Psyttaleia

Template: Infobox Island / Maintenance / height missing

Psittalia (Greek Ψυττάλεια ( f sg ), after their earlier form called also Lipsokoutala ( Λειψοκουτάλα, spoon ') is a small uninhabited island in the Saronic Gulf in Greece, on a huge sewage treatment plant for the Greater Athens was built.

Geography

Psittalia is a 0.375 km ² large island, which originally consists of limestone and clay. The island is 2.2 km south of the coast of Keratsini, a suburb of Piraeus, located in the middle between the port of Piraeus and the island of Salamis. Administratively, the island belongs to Piraeus.

History

Psytt - allos means literally spat out from the sea '. When working on the island who made room for the biological purification plant, marine fossils have been found in the limestone.

The island was involved in fierce battles between the Greeks and Persians at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. The Persians had occupied Psittalia a few days before the battle. Aristides took them back and destroyed the Persians, who had taken refuge after the sinking of their ships there.

Middle of the 20th century was Psittalia a prison island of the Greek Navy.

A small archaeological site and some graves have been preserved.

The rest of the island, however, has been completely redesigned since 1990 to treat the sewage from Athens. For this purpose, first a small bay was filled in on the north side of the island with two million cubic meters of excavated material.

Sewage plant

On the island, the water treatment plant KELPS was built for the sewage of Greater Athens.

Capacity

The wastewater treatment plant on the island Psittalia is the second largest in Europe and one of the largest in the world. Here pretreated municipal and industrial wastewater from the Greater Athens area to be cleaned with some 5.6 million inhabitants. The majority of the wastewater flows to a pumping station on the coast, where it is pumped from nine giant Archimedean screw pumps to the Island.

The capacity of one million cubic meters of wastewater per day, or about twelve cubic meters per second; 2006 average of 705,000 cubic meters of wastewater per day were treated. The equipment complies with the EU Directive on waste water treatment for the year 2020.

Architectural History

  • Phase A: Until 1994, when the first plant was commissioned on Psittalia, most of the Athenians domestic and industrial waste water was discharged without any treatment, which led to severe chemical and bacterial loads. With the completion of Phase A, the primary stage, in 1994, the pollution has been reduced in wastewater by 35 percent. Since then, the system is ensured by initial treatment, filtering, sand removal, primary treatment, anaerobic treatment and mechanical dewatering of sludge includes. The treated effluent was then disposed of through pipelines in 2000 m distance at a depth of 64 meters.
  • Phase B: To comply with the stricter limits for nitrogen, which provided for the European Union directive on urban waste water treatment, a significant improvement was needed. Before the EU-funded upgrade, which cost 200 million euros, the Saronic Gulf was assessed by the EU as critical. When Phase B, the secondary biological stage, in the summer of 2004, the pollution by 93 percent and the amount of nitrogen could be reduced by tertiary treatment by 80 percent. A total of four million cubic meters of soil were cleared to make room for the biological treatment plant. Even large 9.4 m high bioreactors or aeration tanks were built. The technical upgrade included a biological treatment may be removed by the organic polluting carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus compounds. The treatment plant has thus the water quality and environmental conditions in the Saronic Gulf quite greatly improved.
  • Sludge drying: In the treatment plant Psittalia day falls on a lot of approximately 800 tonnes of sewage sludge. This was last stored on the plant premises, as he had been transferred earlier to the landfill of Ano Liossia. The temporary storage of sewage sludge introduce serious risks to public health and the environment and violated the relevant EU regulations. Recently there is a new thermal sludge drying plant, whose construction was funded from the EU budget and is operational since September 2007. Thus, the conformity of the treatment plant operation has been restored. The system consists of four drying lines with a total capacity of 34.5 tons of water evaporation per hour - the equivalent of 300 tons of dried sludge per day. The system is energy efficient and consumes an average of 917 kilowatt-hours of thermal energy per ton of evaporated water. Up to 80 percent of energy needs to be recovered from combined heat and power. After the odor treatment, the gases are passed through regenerative thermal oxidiser and then released into the atmosphere. The remaining dried sewage sludge is shipped and disposed of to the mainland.

The plant is to be further expanded to 2026; then the Saronic bay will gradually be restored back to a form suitable for fishing and recreational zone.

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