Concrete plants extracted equivalent of 31 million bottles of water from the ground in 2021
Extraction of ground water by concrete plants peaked in 2019 when the equivalent of 48 million mineral water bottles were pumped out of the ground
The construction industry is having a toll on Malta’s scarce water resources extracting ‘free’ groundwater at an increasing rate, statistics presented in parliament suggest.
The number of boreholes extracting ‘free’ ground water for concrete plants has shot up from a single borehole in 2014 to 20 in 2021. The amount of water extracted from the water table to produce concrete has shot up from 3,996 cubic metres in 2014 to 62,231 cubic metres in 2021.
This means that in 2021 an equivalent of 31 million two-litre mineral water bottles were used in the production of concrete.
This was revealed in a reply by Energy Minister Miriam Dalli to a question by the PN’s spokesperson for planning and construction Stanley Zammit.
The over extraction of ground water comes at little cost for industry which only pays the energy costs needed to power the borehole but at a great cost to the environment due to increased salinity of this precious resource.
The reply indicates that there was only one borehole used by concrete plants in 2014 and none before that date. But MaltaToday is informed that statistics prior to 2015 are somewhat unreliable as boreholes were still in the process of being metered in that period.
Although boreholes used for commercial and agricultural purposes are metered, the resource extracted is not charged by the government.
Malta had 3,119 metered boreholes in 2019 which extracted a total of 3,832,362 cubic metres. This means that while accounting for just 0.6% of all metered boreholes in Malta, in 2019 concrete plants accounted for 2.5% of all ground water extracted.
Metered boreholes represent less than half of Malta’s 8,000 registered boreholes and their users are not charged for using the public resource.
Statistics provided to MaltaToday by the Energy and Water Agency show that in 2019, extraction from 244 commercial, non-agricultural, boreholes amounted to 833,004 cubic metres.
This means that around 11% of this amount of water used by the non-agricultural sector is extracted by concrete plants.
Metered abstraction from the 2,875 agricultural boreholes amounted to 2,999,358 cubic metres. This means that the commercial sector, which includes water bottling companies, bowsers and concrete plants, accounts for a fifth of metered abstraction.