Riga (dpa) – The breakup of the Soviet Union was a good thing for the Baltic Sea where levels of pollution during the communist era had reduced the ocean to the status of chronically sick.
More than 2,000 new sewage plants of all sizes have been built in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, since the Baltics regained their independence in 1991.Up until then polluted water usually ran unfiltered into the Baltic. Nowadays, fish from the region are in a much cleaner state, according to a study by the Helcom Commission to be published in summer.Concentrations of lead and mercury have decreased by about 40 per cent over the last ten years, and levels of pesticides and dioxins by 90 per cent, the study concludes.“The population of sea eagles is back to normal and we can even see a positive development in the number of seals,” said Guenther Nausch from the Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemuende on the eastern German coast.The bathing quality can now be deemed good or excellent along virtually the whole coast, adds Nausch. Phosphates have also been reduced significantly, he says.Experts are convinced one main reason for this positive development is the big change in water inflow from the Baltic States.In the small, almost landlocked Baltic Sea, pollution from the former Soviet republics had a major effect because there is little water exchange with other oceans to dilute harmful substances.With the fall of communism, Western money and know-how have been pumped into the waste water treatment systems of the East European transition states.Even before the collapse, experts from Helsinki to Copenhagen and Luebeck agreed that pollution of the Baltic Sea had to be cut drastically to help the environment, tourism and fishing.But there could be no success if the negative balance from the states on the northeastern coast was not changed. So since 1991, hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars have been transferred from Western Europe to new sewage plants.About one third of the costs have been covered by western countries, explains Egon Tiht, water expert in the Estonian Environment Ministry.The second third is from the national budget and the last part is financed by cheap credits, he says. In Lithuania and Latvia new plants have also built with western help.The environment ministries of the Scandinavian countries have been especially generous. All combined, the investment could reach up to a billion U.S. dollars, according to the Baltic Environmental Forum, an expert commission working in the Baltics.Since 1995, around 65 per cent of environmental investments have gone toward water treatment, the forum reports. In its latest publication, the forum says that the water quality of rivers used by humans is now almost up to the quality of natural ones.Estonia now purifies 45 per cent of its waste water with so-called “third level” treatment, a way of filtering out phosphates and nitrates by chemical or biological methods.But the standards of the European Union are even higher. So Estonia, like its Baltic neighbours, is asking for transitional periods in the environmental sphere during negotiations about E.U. membership.Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia may need until 2015 to finish the building of new sewage plants, the environmental ministries predict.And as long as Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg in Russia treat water like it is something useless, the environment will remain a priority for the Baltic Sea Council, an association of regional neighbors, according to the German presidency.This is why Baltic Sea experts still do not want to give the all- clear.
