A long-term, sustainable plan for the collection, treatment, and reuse of wastewater

Umm Al Quwain Sewage Treatment Plant

The existing practice in the Emirate of Umm Al Quwain was to use tankers to discharge untreated domestic waste into unmonitored, unregulated, open-air sites in the desert. The Umm Al Quwain residents wanted a new solution—rapidly implementable, cost-effective municipal sewage infrastructure that would quickly end this practice and eliminate the odor from the discharge.

The plan was to create a 5,800 cubic meter per day temporary sewage treatment plant (STP)—a plant that would facilitate the shutdown and remediation of the two discharge lagoons. Our team developed a working plan, completed several studies, established design flows, and considered tanker management requirements. The result? We found an optimum site and identified options for the treated sewage effluent and biosolids.

The new facility includes a tanker reception section, a raw waste water pump station, pre-treatment units, an equalization tank, a metal removal system, sequencing batch reactor units, and disc filter units. It discharges an average of 180 tankers a day, with a peak tanker arrival rate of 20 and a maximum discharge time of 30 minutes. With this new infrastructure solution in place, the Emirate of Umm Al Quwain has successfully mitigated a number of risks to their residents’ health and the local environment.