Cleaning up the Bogota River

The Bogota River is considered one of the most contaminated rivers in the world today. The main waterway of the Capital District has been polluted by a variety of wastewater discharges, domestic and industrial. As it passes through Bogota, the river receives pollutants from the Salitre, Fucha and Tunjuelo rivers and, upon leaving the city, it travels through the Soacha municipality where it is further contaminated by the polluted waters of the Soacha River.

Estimates of the daily effluent output of the Bogota River include: 318 kilograms of chromium; 278 kilograms of lead; 140 tons of iron; 111 tons of detergent and 835 tons of suspension solids.

The project, the largest wastewater treatment plant in Colombia, will improve the quality of life of more than 7 million people.

Project scope

The situation was so dire that a ruling regarding the river was made by the Superior Court of Cundinamarca, as well as a decision of the second hearing by the Council of State. Among other things, they ordered that the Canoas Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) implement primary and secondary treatment processes with disinfection.

This plant, which will be built in the jurisdiction of the municipality of Soacha, will receive the wastewater to be treated from the Fucha, Tunjuelo and Tintal basins (located in the Capital District) as well as the wastewater produced in the urban zone of the municipality of Soacha.

The construction of the WWTP is the most important environmental project in the country and will be the 3rd largest in Latin America for primary and secondary treatment of wastewater. With the construction of this project, 100% of Soacha's urban wastewater and 70% of Bogota's wastewater will be treated.

As a leader in providing multi-disciplinary wastewater engineering services and delivering global solutions based on an integrated project approach, WSP’s strength lies in our team of expert and dedicated planners, engineers and environmental scientists. Our technical expertise combined with excellent communications and consultation specialists, allows us to offer a first-class integrated and strategic approach to industrial and municipal water and wastewater treatment systems on both greenfield and brownfield sites.

In Bogota, WSP provided technical services for the structuring of a public-private partnership (PPP) arrangement for the design, financing, construction, operation and maintenance of the WWTP, which will treat 1,382 million litres per day (MLD). With the use of dynamic software, we performed a model of the plant’s process, mass balance, optimization of reactor sizes and operation parameters, biogas production, and automatization.

This model determined the final quality of the water in discharge in different scenarios (primary and secondary treatment), aeration rates and energy consumption. Also, we established the amount of sludge that will be obtained during the wastewater treatment and analyzed, at pre-feasibility level, different alternatives for the treatment and disposal of the sludge obtained. Moreover, WSP calculated the investment and operation and maintenance costs that the private contractor must incur through the PPP contract.