Delay in public works extends sewage concession until 2033 in Ribeirão Preto

The delay in works that should have been carried out by the Municipality of Ribeirão Preto (313 km from São Paulo) in the first decade of the 2000s —and were not— meant that the sewage treatment concession in the city of São Paulo was extended by 15 years .

Pioneer in the assignment of services to the private sector, Ribeirão had 2018 as the initial deadline for the end of the concession, but an agreement made the concessionaire carry out the works, through amendments to the final term of the concession.

As a result, the term of the contract with GS Inima Ambient now expires in mid-2033. The concession in the municipality is partial: the company manages the sewage, while the Municipality of Ribeirão is responsible for the water system.

“There were already some interceptors in the municipality [de esgoto] installed, but they all fell into the river. We ended up intercepting it and taking it to Ribeirão Preto station […] And another installment at the time the Daerp [extinto departamento de água da cidade] I would have to do it, but time passed and it didn’t happen. In 2007 we made an amendment to the contract, where we took over the construction of the interceptors”, said Félix Antônio de Moura, superintendent of operations at GS Inima Brasil, the concessionaire responsible for sewage treatment in the city.

The company is a subsidiary of GS Inima Environment, controlled by GS E&C, a South Korean conglomerate.

As a result of the works, treated sewage grew and, in 2009, Ribeirão was the first city with more than 500,000 inhabitants in the country to treat and collect 98% of the waste produced.

Started in 1994, the pioneering spirit of the city in the treatment of sewage via concession, however, occurred in the midst of an imbroglio of years.

The Ambient consortium, then formed by the North American CH2MHill and the Brazilian REK, won the tender in the first government (1993-96) of former mayor Antonio Palocci for R$ 37 million (about R$ 280 million in current values, corrected by inflation).

Due to a problem with guarantees, however, financing from the BNDES (National Bank for Economic and Social Development) got stuck, and the works, scheduled for 1998, were delivered in their first stage in 2000, with the Caiçara station, with capacity to treat 14% from the local sewer.

The largest station, called Ribeirão Preto, was inaugurated in 2002, increasing the city’s sewage treatment to 60% at the time.

It was inaugurated in November of that year by Palocci, now in his second term, and by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), who had just been elected for his first term.

22 years after the official start of the operations of the privatized sewage system in Ribeirão Preto, the municipality still does not have 100% of its sewage collected.

The city hall alleges that the extensive rural area and non-regularized places, such as illegal housing in communities or even condominiums far from the urban core, make it difficult to fully implement the network.

Saerp (Secretary of Water and Sewage of Ribeirão Preto) states that 99.59% of the sewage produced in Ribeirão Preto is collected and that, of this index, 100% receives treatment, according to data from the 2022 National Information System on Sanitation, the a cost that reached R$ 70 million last year.

Although the rate of uncollected sewage seems small, the lack of sanitation in 0.41% of the city makes life more difficult for people living in these areas. Cell phone technician Wallace Rafael de Oliveira Bedurin, 32, for example, lives in the Nova Vila União community, one of the areas awaiting land regulation in the municipality and which is home to around 1,200 people.

“From 85% to 90% of the 500 families live without some type of sewage treatment. Some who live in the surroundings managed to make a clandestine connection, but many were not successful. I am one of them, I also live in a house with a cesspool. with allergies or some kind of illness,” said Bedurin.

Community leader, he said that the infrastructure problem harms public health in the most vulnerable points of the city. “The city government could take care of the basic infrastructure, not only here within the communities, but in peripheral neighborhoods, where there is precarious sewage. On Rua Bahia, for example, you can directly find the sewage leaking, returning to the houses of the residents”, he said, who it also has no access to water and electricity networks.

The technician also reports that the problems of lack of sewage accumulate with those of flooding during the rainy season, since the cesspools overflow.

Regarding the points not covered by collection yet, Saerp stated that “it works around the clock to improve the system, implementing new collection networks and carrying out preventive and corrective maintenance, in order to reach 100% of sewage collected and treated in the municipality”.

If the sewage is still not collected throughout the city, the scenario indicates a strong advance in relation to the pre-concession period, since the extinct Daerp had only one lagoon for treatment in the Bonfim Paulista district, which reached only 2% of the 450 thousand inhabitants of that time.

The concessionaire’s assessment is that there has been a significant improvement in the environment since the beginning of sewage treatment. Dissolved oxygen in Ribeirão Preto, one of the watercourses that cross the municipality and where sewage was dumped, went from 0.98 mg/L in 2003 to 4.87 mg/L last year.

“It’s not perfect, but with 4, 4.5 mg/L there’s already a huge diversity of fish that can survive. Before this treatment there wasn’t. The Preto stream, which was just sewage, is now alive”, said Moura.

The total organic matter not released into nature reached 247,123 tons since the beginning of the concession.

INVESTMENTS

The stations, which underwent expansions in 2012 (Caiçara) and 2016 (Ribeirão Preto), will receive new investments in the coming years.

By 2024, the expansion of the largest station should be completed, whose work began this week and will cost R$ 40 million. When completed, the concessionaire will have the capacity to serve 800,000 inhabitants —80,000 more than the city has today.

GS Inima had net revenue of R$117.2 million in 2021, with a net result of R$46.7 million.

In addition to investing in the main station, Caiçara should receive, in current values, R$ 20 million in expansion until the end of the contract.

GS Inima also operates the system in other locations, such as Mogi Mirim (SP), where the system started from scratch in 2008 and today has a sewage treatment rate of 95%. It also operates with total or partial concessions in Araçatuba, Campos do Jordão, Paraibuna, Santa Rita do Passa Quatro, São José dos Campos, Luiz Antonio (all in SP), Ouro Preto (MG) and Maceió.