After parking his car at a self-service car wash station inside a city park, Tao Hui used his phone to scan a QR code, and soon water gushed out from a machine to swill the vehicle.
"This is reclaimed water and the service is widely used here," said Tao, from the city of Suzhou in east China's Anhui Province. "It's economical and environmentally friendly."
Suzhou has long suffered from water shortage. The utilization of reclaimed water has provided an effective solution.
"Domestic sewage is processed into reclaimed water and a total of 140,000 tonnes of such water is used in the city each day, of which 100,000 tonnes is fed into rivers for water replenishment, 30,000 tonnes used as industrial water and 10,000 tonnes as municipal water," said Zhu Congshen, deputy director of the landscape management service center in Suzhou.
Besides the car wash station, two facilities -- shaped as elephants -- in the city park can supply reclaimed water to street sprinklers and fire trucks. The same water is used in the fountain, public toilets and a river flowing through the park.
Zhu noted that Suzhou has built four reclaimed water pipelines, totaling 32.4 kilometers. "They supply about 36 million tonnes of water to the river every year," he added.
An array of reservoirs serving different functions have been constructed as part of a water recycling plant, located near the sewage treatment facility of south Suzhou. Wastewater is processed into reclaimed water after a complicated process which includes sedimentation, filtration and disinfection.
"This plant can handle 160,000 tonnes of wastewater each day and the processed water is used in industrial cooling systems and urban landscape irrigation," said Cheng Xiaoxiong, general manager of the company that operates the plant.
A big data platform of the plant has helped further enhance the management of reclaimed water and optimize water utilization.
"With this platform, we can monitor the water quality and detect the flow in the pipelines. We use video cameras to monitor the condition of different water outlets and distribute tasks to workers in a timely manner," Cheng said.
According to a document jointly issued by 10 government departments in January, China will improve sewage water treatment capabilities and enhance the transformation of sewage into resources. By 2025, in cities suffering from water shortages, more than 25 percent of the total sewage treated should be used as reclaimed water, the document noted.
"Compared with developing other water resources, the recycling of reclaimed water has both economic advantages and environmental benefits," Cheng said.
