China Environmental Protection Online Wastewater Treatment has invested over 114 billion yuan, which is the total amount of investment from 36 key cities in the past year for the treatment of black and odorous water bodies. In the next two years, the "hat removal" action with stricter regulatory measures and more refined governance measures will continue.

The national water pollution prevention and control work has started well, but the situation is still severe. Among them, the treatment of urban black and odorous water bodies is regarded as the top task.

For a long time, the treatment of black and odorous water bodies has been a challenge in urban sewage treatment. How effective is the treatment of black and odorous water bodies? What are the standards? In fact, it is very clear that the black and odorous water body document jointly issued by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Rural Development clearly states that the water quality must first meet the standard and be superior to the standard for mild black and odorous water. According to a report from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment on February 28th, as of the end of 2018, more than 1058 black and odorous water bodies have been identified in 36 key cities nationwide, and nearly 1000 have completed remediation projects, accounting for about 94.58% of the total.

Among the 101 national control sections involved in black and odorous water bodies, the proportion of Class I-III water quality increased by 3 percentage points year-on-year, while the proportion of inferior Class V water quality decreased by 4.9 percentage points. More than 97% of provincial-level and above industrial parks have built sewage centralized treatment facilities and installed automatic online monitoring devices, an increase of more than 40 percentage points compared to before the implementation of the "Ten Measures for Water" in 2015. To complete the task, according to incomplete statistics, the above-mentioned cities have built nearly 19800 kilometers of sewage pipelines, more than 304 sewage treatment plants (facilities), and added nearly 14.08 million tons of daily processing capacity.

Although the treatment of black and odorous water bodies has achieved initial results, the future treatment is still a tight and heavy battle, and requires great efforts. "The difficulty in working on black and odorous water bodies still lies in the direct discharge of urban sewage and garbage. We need to see if this problem is effectively solved and what measures are needed to solve it," said Zhang Bo, Director of the Water Department of the Ministry of Environment. In addition, due to inadequate regulation and other factors, large areas of floating debris have appeared on the water bodies and rivers in some places, and a large amount of garbage is randomly piled up on the riverbanks, which also poses a hidden danger of the rebound of black and odorous water bodies.

In fact, the purpose of rectifying black and odorous water bodies is to use this as a starting point to force the construction of urban environmental infrastructure and accelerate the filling of gaps. The difficulty of paying back this account can be imagined, both in terms of technical paths and financial resources. The investment in the treatment of urban black and odorous water bodies is large, and the later management and maintenance still require a large amount of funds, putting enormous financial pressure on local governments. According to recent authoritative media reports, 36 key cities have invested over 113.7 billion yuan directly in the treatment of black and odorous water bodies. How to ensure the achievement of the goals set in the Action Plan for Water Pollution Prevention and Control, and strive to achieve "long-term control and long-term cleaning"?

Faced with these challenging challenges, strengthening supervision and inspection has become an important part of the Implementation Plan for the Battle of Urban Black and Odor Water Treatment, and also an important means of future governance work. The remediation of black and odorous water bodies is a rolling management mechanism, which does not mean that once the remediation is completed, it will be ignored. We will continuously include reported, dissatisfied, and new black and odorous water bodies in the national list for supervision and remediation. Even after 2020, this work will still be closely monitored.

To smoothly promote the above plan, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment has also formulated a series of measures. It is true that the focus of treating black and odorous water bodies in the next two years will be on prefecture level cities. In 2019, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment will continue to closely monitor the supervision, consolidation, improvement, and prevention of rebound in order to accelerate the rectification of completed goals. At the same time, we will focus on the Yangtze River Economic Belt and promote the remediation of black and odorous water bodies in prefecture level cities, striving to eliminate more than 90% of black and odorous water bodies in built-up areas of prefecture level cities within two years. In addition, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment plans to basically eliminate key areas that have basically lost their use and heavily polluted water bodies by 2019, and to fight a "battle to protect clean water".

Challenges are also opportunities, and the above difficulties mean that there is still a certain investment demand for black and odorous water bodies. It is necessary to stimulate and safeguard the decisive role of the market, and turn the potential environmental protection market into a real environmental protection market. Analysis suggests that the market space for the treatment of black and odorous water bodies in China will exceed 400 billion yuan, and with the addition of sewage treatment plants and river channel improvement, the market size will far exceed one trillion yuan. But more importantly, industry veteran Xue Tao said that the treatment of black and odorous water bodies is more about meticulous work, and the effectiveness should be sought from meticulous management. The operation and maintenance after construction are very important. The sewage treatment plant is a major regulatory authority of the environmental department, but the complex underground pipeline system also needs to be well maintained.