The sewage treatment plant has been built, why is the sewage still discharged directly into the Yellow River

In some underdeveloped areas in the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River, some sewage treatment plants have been reduced to septic tanks

A sewage aeration tank is placed in a steel shed at a sewage treatment plant in Gander county, east China's Jiangsu province, Sept. 11, 2020.

Built a sewage treatment plant, there are still a lot of sewage straight discharge, eventually into the Yellow River; Due to high operating costs, some sewage treatment stations have no choice but to "sleep" or even "become" septic tanks.

Xinhua Daily Telegraph reporter recently visited a number of underdeveloped areas along the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River and found that due to poor infrastructure, poor equipment operation and high daily operation costs, many areas have "built sewage treatment plants and sewage treatment is still difficult."

There are treatment plants but still direct discharge of sewage, pollution control in the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River is still a problem

Multi-party investment in the construction of sewage treatment plants, due to insufficient treatment capacity, low efficiency, limited coverage, sewage is still difficult to "full collection, full treatment." Some residents' domestic sewage can only be discharged directly and eventually into the Yellow River, which is what the reporter saw when visiting the middle and upper reaches of the Yellow River basin.

In a county in the middle reaches of the Yellow River, there is a first class tributary of the Yellow River through the territory. Local environmental protection officials introduced that in recent years, due to strengthened supervision, industrial wastewater is basically discharged according to the standard, and the main pollution comes from rural domestic sewage. To this end, two small sewage treatment stations have been built in towns far away from the county seat, but the operation status is not satisfactory.

The reporter came to the bank of a township river with a small sewage treatment station and saw that many residents' domestic sewage was discharged directly into the river through pipes. When pipes are broken, sewage flows directly down the dam to the riverbed, staining the brick walls black.

A staff member of the local environmental protection department introduced that although in 2018, with the support of the municipal and county-level finance, the township built a new sewage treatment station, the construction cost of the supporting pipe network is too high, and the domestic sewage can only be collected by nearly half of the town's population, and the actual treatment capacity is only half of the design capacity.

To this end, the county construction department built 20 water storage tanks along the river bank in the local area, temporarily collecting residents' domestic sewage, and then centralized transport through the sewage collection truck to the nearby sewage treatment station. Some staff admitted, "The processing capacity of the treatment station is limited, and the equipment such as pumps often has problems, many times it is too late to pull, and the sewage from the storage tank overflows, which also causes the sewage to flow directly into the river."

Gande County, Guoluo Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, is located in the source of three rivers, close to the source of the Yellow River. The reporter saw in the Gander County sewage treatment plant that the conventional open-air sewage aeration pool was placed in a steel shed house. Into the steel shed room, obviously feel the indoor temperature increase.

"There is no way, the temperature here is low, and the microorganisms that treat sewage are easy to freeze to death, so the aeration tank can only be installed indoors and the boiler is burned to keep warm." The person in charge of the sewage treatment plant said that the Gander County sewage treatment plant is more than 4,000 meters above sea level, and the winter temperature is low, and it must be insulated by the outer steel shed house and the internal boiler.

"The cost of burning coal for boilers alone is about 250,000 yuan a year, which is not a small expense." The person in charge said that the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is large and sparsely populated, and the temperature difference between day and night is large, resulting in difficult sewage treatment and high construction and operation costs.

More urgent is that the total investment of more than 20 million yuan to build the Gande County sewage treatment plant, mainly to treat the county residential areas, office buildings and shops of domestic sewage. At present, the daily processing capacity is 1200 tons, which has been running at full capacity, and it is urgent to expand and improve the processing capacity.

Construction and operation costs are high and the burden is heavy, and some sewage treatment plants have been reduced to septic tanks

The reporter visited and found that the main reason why some underdeveloped areas in the middle and upper reaches of the Yellow River basin "have sewage treatment plants and are still difficult to treat sewage" is that the construction cost of the collection sewage network is high and the sewage treatment operation burden is heavy. In particular, many underdeveloped counties have just lifted themselves out of poverty, and their financial resources are limited, making it difficult to bear the construction and operation costs of "full collection and full treatment" of sewage.