Southern Water Reaches Key Phase For Environmental Improvement Scheme

A major wastewater treatment improvement scheme in Millbrook, Southampton has reached its key phase. The scheme is a part of a £25 million project, in which the treatment works in Millbrook have been rebuilt.

When the scheme was originally launched, Southern Water explained how algal blooms can grow in coastal waters when the levels of nutrients are too high. This can result in a reduction of oxygen in the water and could potentially smother fish and other creatures. Therefore the removal of these nutrients is crucial to ensure that the water leaving the site is of the best possible quality, in order to continually meet the increasingly high standards of the Environment Agency.

The scheme will have a great benefit on the environment. The refurbished treatment works will treat wastewater to higher standards before releasing into the Solent.

Southern Water has announced that the flows have now been switched on at the refurbished works. Up to 70 million litres of wastewater will flow through the newly built structures per day. Testing will continue up until the autumn season. Once the testing has finished, the equipment will become fully functional. Additionally, 90% of waste materials produced during the refurbishment were reused or recycled.

Throughout the duration of the project, a construction team of 50 will use approximately 9,000 cubic metres of concrete. That’s almost enough concrete to fill four Olympic swimming pools!

The 4Delivery project team has accomplished a lot so far, successfully constructing various useful apparatus, such as a new treatment tank. The tank will be the home of millions of bacteria. Particles in wastewater will be broken down in the tank. They have constructed 68, 16 meter-long, eight-tonne beams that hold the treatment tank, as well as two settlement tanks, 33 metres in diameter each. The project team has also developed more than 100 tonnes of above-ground steelwork, more than 3 kilometers of cable ducts and a 1-mile pipeline, which measures up to 1.2 meters in diameter.

The Southern Water project manager, Jon Jenrick, said “from an engineering point of view, this has been an exciting scheme to work on. It will have huge environmental benefits – the end result will be a much greener treatment works that will treat wastewater to even higher standards before releasing it into the Solent.”