<html> <body> <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1315850,00.html" eudora="autourl">http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1315850,00.html</a> EU pays to stem Russia's sewage Brussels funds St Petersburg clean-up to cut Baltic pollution after Putin declines to help Paul Brown in St Petersburg Thursday September 30, 2004 The Guardian The EU is providing more than Ł100m in grants and loans to tackle pollution from Russia's second city, St Petersburg, which has already killed off vast stretches of the Baltic sea. The decision to fund work outside the EU's borders - Ł5m is coming from the UK - is a departure for Brussels, but officials believe it has been forced upon them by the refusal of Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, to provide cash for the work. The millions of gallons of raw sewage which flow out of the river Neva every year have already taken a toll: the Gulf of Finland is devoid of all life on large areas of the sea bed, ruined by the high levels of phosphorus. On the surface, toxic algae are turning the sea blue-green. After extensive lobbying from EU states bordering the Baltic, the European commission finally despaired of the Russian president and decided to try to prevent further deterioration of the fragile Gulf of Finland by using €50m (Ł34m) in grants in addition to €107m in loans from European banks to pay for sewage treatment in the city. For years, the wealthy countries located on the Baltic - Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Finland - have been cleaning up their own discharges into the sea. The northern arm of the Baltic is now clean, with the populations of grey seals, salmon and sea eagles making dramatic recoveries from a point of near extinction during the 1970s. But the southern part of the Baltic close to Poland, which also discharges raw sewage, and the eastern end at St Petersburg continue to get worse. Scientists on the Muikku, a research vessel of the Finnish Environment Institute, have been taking samples in coastal waters over five summers, and in 2003 estimated that 4,000 sq km (1,500 square miles) of the Gulf of Finland on the sea bed was devoid of oxygen and that all life had disappeared. It takes up to 30 years for water to flush out the Baltic, so recovery will take time, but the Finns say the first job is to stop the situation getting worse. Given the accession of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania to the EU this year, sewage works improvements had already been funded in those countries. But St Petersburg, with its 6 million population, remained the largest single problem. The firm Vodokanal, which is in charge of the city's water and sewage treatments, has been trying to lever funds out of the central government for years to allow St Petersburg to live up to its commitments under the international Helsinki treaty known as Helcom, designed to clean up the Baltic. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union plans were under way to solve the problem. In the 1970s an artificial island was built in the shallow water outside the city to process 75% of the city's sewage. But this still left about 330,000 cubic metres of raw sewage flowing into the gulf each day. Two new sewerage works were needed to solve these problems. One, in the south-west of the city, was begun in the 1980s, but all work stopped and the site was abandoned in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. A second plant was finished in the north but it failed to operate to capacity because there were not enough funds for a giant connector pipe to link the city to the new works. The EU is funding the works in the south of the city, a project expected to be completed by 2005. Jaakko Kakela, managing director of the Finnish construction company SWTP, which is building the works, said: "The largest single problem for the Baltic is the phosphorus which causes toxic algae blooms, and they are fed by raw sewage from here. "We have been able to use the foundations of the original unfinished Soviet works to produce electricity. These works will cut off 70% of those nutrients from the south of the city and another 20% will be taken out if the Russians use ferrous sulphate to treat the water before it goes into the sea. "Currently there is not a factory that produces it in Russia but we are working on that too." Anton Zharkov, spokesman for Vodokanal, said: "We want to live up to our obligations under the Helcom agreement but we have no way of funding such projects without federal funds and other outside help. We are very grateful to our neighbours and the EU. We feel close now to our goals." </body> </html>