After years of investing in building up wastewater treatment facilities, lack of proper operation and management has become a new impediment in China's efforts to clean up its rivers and lakes.

This is what a recent environmental inspection tour in Shanxi province, China's major coal production base and one of the country's heavily polluted areas, has concluded.

Organized by the Bureau of Environmental Supervision (BES) and the Northern China Environment Supervision Center, both under Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), the inspection tour is part of the annual nationwide monitoring and supervising of environmental protection dictates initiated by the States Council.

The inspection team reached out to some of the province's dirtiest counties and cities, for instance Linfen and Jincheng, where high-emissions and heavy-polluting industries, such as coking, iron and steel, are clustered.

Although the pollution treatment facilities have been set up according to MEP's requirement, the province's overall management standard and environment awareness is still below par, Lu Xinyuan, director of BES, tells China Business Weekly.

"The province is arming itself with pollution treatment facilities. But this is not enough." Lu says, "Lack of proper operation and management will hinder it from realizing its goals for pollution reduction."

This is a serious concern especially when the central government is determined to invest more in building sewage and household garbage treatment facilities nationwide.

As part of the central government's 4-trillion-yuan economic stimulus package, some 280 billion yuan will be spent on sewage treatment in 90 percent of counties nationwide in the coming years.

About 2,600 counties will benefit from the building or upgrading of facilities, according to Qiu Baoxing, vice-minister of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

But without professional operation and management, the investment would not be able to generate expected benefits, Lu warns.

Wastewater treatment

The inspection result shows that some of the sewage treatment plants in the province are not operating on a full scale, with individual cases of halting operation without permission.

Seven out of 49 sewage treatment plants are discharging treated wastewater that fails to reach the emissions standard, or containing pollutants that exceed the maximum authorized levels.

In addition, charges for handling and treating wastewater in the province are below the national average, which is inconsistent with Shanxi's economic status, whose fiscal revenue in 2007 ranked 13th among the country's 31 provinces, the inspection result shows.

In Taiyuan, capital city of Shanxi province, the charge for sewage treatment is about 0.5 yuan per ton. Other parts of the province are only collecting 0.2 or 0.3 yuan per ton.

In contrast, the average figure in China's economically well-off areas reaches 0.7 to 0.8 yuan per ton.

As a result, the sewage treatment plants in Shanxi provinc lack enough money to maintain normal operation, and more than 50 percent of them have to rely on government subsidies.

The inspection team also found out that the operation of online monitoring system at some sewage plants violates national regulations, leaving them open to artificially manipulating the monitoring results.

Sludge piling up

The sewage plants are generating a large amount of sludge everyday. But little of the sludge is properly treated the inspection team discovered.

At the backyard of a sewage treatment plant in Yuncheng, Shanxi province, sludge residue was scattered on the ground still wet and foul-smelling.

Xiong Yuehui, head of the Northern China Environment Supervision Center, says he doubted that the plant was piling up sludge there since it was put into operation two years ago, but he had suspicions about where it may have gone.

"I have no idea where the sludge ends up," says Xiong. "The plant may have dumped it into rivers or piled it up at other places, just to cope with the inspection.

"It's really terrible." Xiong says, "It's a simple calculation: treating each ton of wastewater will generate about 5 tons of sludge and the plant has been treating about 3 tons of household sewage everyday for two years."

Sewage sludge is an inevitable byproduct of the wastewater treatment process, but if left untreated can become a toxic hazard.

The sludge can cause secondary pollution, he says, as it may contain some heavy metals and other toxic elements.

The sludge problem is not only happening in Shanxi, it' s also a national challenge.

According to figures from the MEP, by 2010, 60 percent of all urban wastewater will be treated, which will in turn generate about 30 million tons of sludge every year.

China is still weak on monitoring and treatment technology for sludge, according to Zhao Yingmin, head of MEP's department of science, technology and standards.

Market-oriented operation

The introduction of market-oriented managed and operated sewage plants is being strongly encouraged in Shanxi province to tackle the current problems, according to Lu Xinyuan, from BES.

"Currently the sewage plants are supervised by the local government in Shanxi, but the country has been encouraging market-oriented operations, either from domestic or overseas-funded enterprises, because they can provide professional management and reduce costs," Lu says.

For instance, one of the sewage plants with a daily treatment capacity of 5 tons in Shanxi province hires about 80 people. In contrast, only 12 workers are working at a similar-sized plant in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, with Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) operation.

"There is no doubt that the staff redundancy has increased costs and left few funds for the proper operation of the sewage treatment facilities," Lu says.With the BOT concept, governments can, with a franchise agreement, authorize a private developer to design, finance, construct and operate a revenue-producing public project, such as sewage plant, and then turn it over to the government at the end of a specified payback period.

Such infrastructure building options have become popular in recent years in eastern parts of China, but Shanxi needs to catch up now, Lu says.

(China Daily 12/29/2008 page5)