Certification
The sewage system is ISO 14001 certified for its Environmental Quality.
State-of-the-art technology to bring enhanced quality of life to residents.
Challenge
The City of Toulouse entrusted the management of its drinking water and wastewater services to Veolia Water in 1990, and especially the management of wastewater treatment plant at Ginestous-Garonne. Oversight for wastewater treatment systems was transferred to the Greater Toulouse Urban Community in 2001.
The primary challenges for the local authorities being to generally rehabilitate plants including landscape integration and eliminating the odors linked to a facility designed in the 1950s.
Objectives
- Improving the efficiency of Toulouse's wastewater system by stepping up the effluent monitoring systems and by optimizing the way the collection networks operate.
- Implementing highly effective treatment and recycling of depollution sludge residues to ensure improved environmental protection.
- Improving air quality and eliminating undesirable smells from the wastewater treatment plant.
Veolia Water's solution
High efficiency cleasing
The quality of the water returned to nature was improved thanks to the treatment of nitrogen content pollutants using BiostyrTM biofiltration: with 98% efficiency for DBO5, 96% for MES, 93% for DCO and 91% for NK.
Efficiently reusing depollution sludge
- Agricultural reuse as a fertilizer, in dry pellet form or as compost.
- Thermally eliminating sludge by incineration using PyrofluidTM furnaces and treating the smoke using a dry process and reusing residues in concrete products.
Monitoring air quality
Air treatment efficiency tests with a jury made up of residents from local communities to evaluate odor impact; automatic odor metering sensors.
Highly effective odor elimination systems
Physico-chemical, thermal and biological air treatments that cleanse more than eight million cubic meters of air every day, from the water depollution and aeration pools as well as from the areas used to dry, compost and pack sludge.
Stepped up measures for monitoring the natural habitat
- Checking the biological balance in the Garonne River with two water quality measurement stations, one upstream and one downstream of the release point (3,500 measurements per year during all treatment stages).
- 24 hour monitoring of heat treatment units and daily results on cleansing.
Raising awareness on environmental and health issues
Creating a tool for presenting the wastewater system to the general public to reaffirm the plant's primary vocation: preserving the river's ecosystems by depolluting effluents, thereby protecting the environment.
