The consensus in the industry is that the market environment has indeed changed profoundly.The industry generally believes that due to the increasingly saturated urban sewage, the future of China's sewage treatment in the main battlefield in the countryside.For the rural sewage treatment market, urbanization will drive the construction of a number of thousand-ton scale sewage treatment plants.Even considering the factors of rural population reduction caused by the increase of urbanization rate, the construction and operation of rural sewage treatment facilities in China can still reach the level of one trillion.According to the estimation of E20 Research Institute, the market space of rural sewage treatment is estimated to be 120 billion yuan after the "13th Five-Year" period.

Rural sewage treatment facilities are the engineering technical guarantee of pollutant reduction.Although the market space of rural sewage industry is large, the attraction of rural sewage treatment to water enterprises is weak compared with that of urban sewage treatment plants."Compared with cities, the rural sewage treatment market is more dispersed, with fewer professionals, and the requirements for operation and maintenance are more direct and urgent."This also determines that traditional urban water utilities gradually participate in rural sewage treatment, and the mode of participation is mainly government purchase of operation and maintenance service providers or PPP mode.

But to really take advantage of the blue ocean, we need to sort out the current problems.The 13th Five-Year Plan for Comprehensive Environmental Improvement in Rural Areas emphasizes that by 2020, 130,000 newly established villages will have completed comprehensive environmental improvement, and the sewage treatment rate should be more than 60%.However, compared with urban sewage treatment, rural sewage treatment is more dependent on and needs technology.Restricted by geographical location, village layout and other factors, the lack of sewage collection pipe network, similar to the centralized scale treatment of urban sewage in rural areas has a great inadaptability.

Discharge of domestic sewage in rural areas is scattered, the way is random, the composition is different, is the rural human settlement environment governance difficulty and prominent weakness." According to relevant statistics, there are more than 600,000 administrative villages in China, and the country's rural areas produce about 9 billion tons of domestic sewage every year.At the same time, the gap of rural sewage treatment facilities is large, the construction cost is high, the treatment rate is low.Rural residents live in relatively scattered, single household population is small, domestic sewage per capita discharge is small, sewage treatment capacity is not very large.At the same time, complex terrain and inconsistent slopes in villages increase the difficulty of pipe network collection. In some villages, pipe network collection requires bridge crossing, hole piercing and pumping.

In total, there are 52 kinds of rural sewage treatment technologies in China, and many of them apply urban sewage treatment technologies.Compared with rural sewage treatment facilities, sewage treatment plants in villages and towns with larger scale and more investment also have the problem of "building but not working" or even "building but not using".Rural domestic sewage treatment is not the more difficult, the smaller the amount of water means that the water quality and water fluctuate more, the smaller the facility scale is more difficult to stable operation.In some places, there is an obvious problem of putting more emphasis on construction than on operation and more emphasis on investment than on management.As a matter of fact, some counties and municipalities have "contracted" the sewage treatment projects of the villages that need to be treated together, and have unified bidding and tendering.

However, the lack of sewage treatment charging mechanism in rural areas makes the operating funds of sewage treatment facilities generally relatively tight.For a medium-sized small town with a population of about 5,000, sewage treatment facilities with a daily treatment capacity of 600 tons (including reserved treatment capacity) should be built, with an initial investment of about 10 million yuan.Bidding enterprises are usually in accordance with a set of equipment, a set of technology, a set of standards to construction.But for rural areas, so-called "harmful ingredients" such as nitrogen and phosphorus in sewage are actually nutrients for crops.

After the construction of rural domestic sewage treatment facilities, low cost operation is the key to ensure its long-term operation.Rural sewage treatment technology and equipment should be more adaptable to the change of water load and concentration load, with low cost and simple operation and maintenance operation.It is necessary to adopt the construction mode and treatment technology of combining pollution control with resource utilization, engineering measures with ecological measures, centralized treatment with decentralized treatment, and single household with multi-household.So it seems that there are many good solutions to the problem of sewage treatment in villages and towns. The key is whether there is a remedy to the case.