On 8 July, the town hall of Ungheni signed a cooperation agreement with the Institute of Ecology and Geography of the State University of Moldova. As announced, it sounds like administrative routine: a seminar, a signature, thanks all round. But the stake behind it is very concrete and decades old — and it concerns the very river the town drinks from.
A town that drinks from the Prut and discharges into the Prut
Ungheni takes its drinking water straight from the Prut, through an intake operating since 1972 that feeds the town’s water network and the surrounding villages — more than 40,000 people. The town’s wastewater also ends up in the basin of the same river, after passing through the treatment plant.
And that is where the problem lies. According to the town hall’s own strategy — the document «Development of the Water Supply and Sewerage Sector in Ungheni municipality 2018–2025» — the treatment plant, located at Valea Mare and commissioned back in 1975, was, at the date of that diagnosis, running «on the mechanical treatment stage only». The biological stage — the one that actually cleans the water of its organic load — was no longer working, because the tanks and settlers were in disrepair. The conclusion is right there in the town hall’s document: the water «partially treated and discharged into the Prut represents a source of pollution» for the river.
That diagnosis is from 2018, and the strategy’s period has expired. There is no public confirmation that the biological stage has since been repaired; the major investments of recent years went elsewhere (see below). In other words, the same water the town draws from the Prut to drink returns to the river carrying whatever was not cleaned — a loop that the Prut’s problems, from microplastics to micropollutants, make all the heavier.
Who the researchers are and what they know how to measure
The agreement brings to Ungheni exactly the specialists in this problem. Andrian Țugulea and Vladimir Mogîldea, the two researchers who presented at the seminar, are doctors of biology and coordinating researchers at the «Ecourbanistics» laboratory of the Institute of Ecology and Geography — an institute formerly of the Academy of Sciences, today part of the State University of Moldova. Their stated field: the impact of cities on the environment, the treatment of urban wastewater, and the management of water resources at basin level.
What they can do is clear from their work so far. In Bălți, the team measured, figure by figure, how much a treatment plant harms the river it discharges into: the biochemical oxygen demand — an indicator of organic pollution, the higher the dirtier the water — rose from 5.71 to 7.52 mg/dm³ just downstream of the plant, and in 2011–2018 the plant had exceeded the permitted limits for ammonium and suspended solids. Those figures concern Bălți, not Ungheni — but they are exactly the kind of measurement that, at Ungheni, has not yet been made public.
Nor is it the institute’s first contact with the district: in 2015, the same specialists issued an ecological assessment for a compact treatment station requested by the town hall of Cornești, also in Ungheni district.
The money went to water, not to treatment
Ungheni’s paradox is that, on water, serious money has been invested in recent years — but almost all of it went to the intake and the networks, not to treatment. With German money, through GIZ and the European Union, kilometres of water main were rehabilitated and the water and sewerage networks extended, benefiting more than 34,000 residents. The drinking-water treatment station is being upgraded through a regional project. At Valea Mare, under the «European Village» programme, new sewerage networks were built connecting the village straight to the municipality’s treatment plant — that is, adding load to it, without its modernisation being confirmed.
The lagging link is precisely the treatment stage. It is a dilemma the town has carried for a long time: modernise its own plant at Valea Mare, or send its wastewater to the plant in Iași? In 2014 and 2016, Ungheni signed agreements with the Iași operator to take over its wastewater «for the benefit of the river Prut» — agreements that remained on paper and expired unimplemented.
What «ecosystem services» means and why it matters
Beyond wastewater, the agreement speaks of «ecosystem services» and «ecological infrastructure» — technical terms with a very practical meaning. Ecosystem services are the benefits nature gives the town for free: clean air, the shade and coolness of trees on a hot day, the retention of rainwater by soil and vegetation, a riverbank where you can walk. Ecological infrastructure is the network of green and water spaces — parks, tree alignments, wetlands, the river itself — designed to work as a system.
Ungheni already has an example under way: the regeneration of the French Park on the bank of the Prut, with rainwater retention basins and permeable surfaces, exactly the kind of «green infrastructure» the agreement is about.
For now, the agreement with the Institute of Ecology and Geography is a signature and a seminar. Its test is whether it moves anything at the Valea Mare plant and in the way the town manages its water — or whether it remains, like the agreements with Iași, a good intention on paper.