Wastewater Recycling in Greece: The Case of Thessaloniki

Andreas Ilias, Athanasios Panoras and Andreas Angelakis
Additional contact information
Andreas Ilias: Land Reclamation Institute of Thessaloniki, Hellenic Agricultural Organization DEMETER-N.AG.RE.F., 57400 Sindos Thessaloniki, Greece
Athanasios Panoras: Land Reclamation Institute of Thessaloniki, Hellenic Agricultural Organization DEMETER-N.AG.RE.F., 57400 Sindos Thessaloniki, Greece
Andreas Angelakis: Institute of Iraklion, Hellenic Agricultural Organization DEMETER-N.AG.RE.F., 71307 Iraklion and Hellenic Water Supply and Sewerage Services Association, 41222 Larissa, Greece

Sustainability, 2014, vol. 6, issue 5, 1-17

Abstract: In Greece, and particularly in many southeastern and island areas, there is severe pressure on water resources, further exacerbated by the high demand of water for tourism and irrigation in summertime. The integration of treated wastewater into water resources management is of paramount importance to meet future demands. Despite this need, only a few projects of effluent reuse have been implemented, most of them being pilot projects of crop or landscape irrigation. The most important projects which are currently in practice are those of Thessaloniki, Chalkida, Malia, Livadia, Amfisa, Kalikratia, and Chersonissos. In Thessaloniki, at the most important wastewater reuse site, the secondary effluent of the city’s Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP) (165,000 m 3 /day) is used for agricultural irrigation after mixing with freshwater at a 1:5 ratio. The main crops irrigated are rice, corn, alfalfa and cotton. A few other projects are under planning, such as that at Iraklion, Agios Nikolaos and several island regions. Finally, it should be mentioned that there are several cases of indirect reuse, especially in central Greece. However, the reuse potential in Greece is limited, since effluent from Athens’s WWTP, serving approximately half of the country’s population, is not economically feasible due to the location of the plant.

Keywords: water recycling; wastewater reuse; wastewater in agriculture, water use in agriculture; agricultural water quality criteria; water reuse in Greece (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/6/5/2876/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/6/5/2876/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:6:y:2014:i:5:p:2876-2892:d:36025

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().