237 Beijing communities use recycled water to flush toilets

In a trip organized by the Press Center for the 60th anniversary celebration of the founding of the P.R.China, over 30 domestic and overseas reporters visited the Beijing Qinghe Wastewater Treatment Plant on the afternoon of September 28. Jiang Yong, deputy general manager of Beijing Drainage Group (BDG), said in an interview that at the end of September, the municipally recycled water was available to 237 communities in Beijing, covering a building area totaling 73 million square meters. In the future, the company plans to give affordable housing communities access to recycled water pipelines in order to further lower the cost of living for low-income households.

At the end of 2008, Beijing had a total of nine wastewater treatment plants in urban districts that are capable of processing 2.5 million cubic meters of wastewater per day at a wastewater treatment rate of 93 percent. To ease the shortage of urban water resources, Beijing has accelerated the pace at which wastewater is utilized. BDG has built five recycled water plants and two recycled water pumping stations in urban districts and laid 550 kilometers of recycled water pipelines, increasing its daily water supply capacity to 1.02 million cubic meters. In 2008, 600 million cubic meters of recycled water was used in Beijing, accounting for 17 percent of the total water supply. According to the proportion of recycled water consumed, recycled water in Beijing is mainly utilized in the following four areas: agricultural irrigation, urban rivers and lakes, industry, as well as urban landscaping including gardens, green areas and other uses.

"Currently, households mainly use recycled water to flush toilets and the water price is only one yuan per ton," said Jiang. At present, the communities with access to recycled water all are newly built where recycled water transmission pipelines could be built at the same time as the other municipal pipelines. Because of the difference in bearing capacity between older and newer buildings, the renovation projects of old communities will temporarily not involve recycled water pipelines.

Presently, there are two main ways to reuse recycled water as residential water: collecting recyclable water through buildings and recycling water from the municipal water pipelines. Recycling water from municipal water pipelines takes into account both scale and the economic advantages of recycling water and is also able to avoid the drawbacks in collecting water through buildings, such as unstable system operation and variable water quality.

In April 2009, the second phase of construction on the Qinghe recycled water project and the Lugouqiao recycled water project begun. Upon completion, they will be able to supply 650,000 cubic meters of recycled water per day to both northern and southern areas of Beijing. After the nine urban wastewater treatment plants are upgraded, around 800 million cubic meters of processed wastewater will fully be transformed into quality recycled water per year, equivalent to the water retention capacity of the Miyun Reservoir.

Translated by LOTO