Cost of raising discharge standards: A plant-by-plant assessment from wastewater sector in China

Abstract

China has implemented increasingly stringent effluent standards for wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) to protect the aquatic environment, but at the cost of more resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. To elaborate tradeoffs between the elevated standard and the additional burden, we compile a 10-year inventory of 6032 WWTPs across China to estimate the impacts of changes in effluent pollutant concentration on operating costs and electricity consumption. Coupled with the increasing demand for wastewater treatment, upgrading standards to the Special Discharge Limit (SDL) by 2030 would increase electricity consumption and operating costs of the wastewater treatment sector by 86.59% and 70.44% compared to the status quo in 2015. The electricity consumption-induced GHG emissions would also increase by 72.21%, which accounts for 29.16% of total emissions in the domestic wastewater treatment sector. Substantial regional differences exist in terms of upgrade-induced resource burden. Less developed regions generally suffer more stress when encountering similar standards elevation. With large-scale microdata, our findings deepen the understanding of the potential cost of raising standards and provide insights into region-customized pollutant effluent standards implementation.