The press center of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China holds a press conference on Oct 21, 2022. Zhai Qing, member of the leading Party Group and Vice minister of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, talked with journalists on the theme of "Building a beautiful China where people and nature coexist in harmony".

With the rapid development of urbanization and economic society in recent years, environmental problems have become increasingly prominent. As a sharp sword of environmental protection, the central supervision of ecological and environmental protection has played an important role in these years, promoting the solution of many environmental problems.

01

The first two rounds worked

Since the pilot program began at the end of 2015, inspectors have completed two rounds of coverage in 31 provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities directly under the central government) and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and inspected some departments and Chinese enterprises, Zhai said. Over the past few years, the inspectors have achieved remarkable results of "recognition from the central government, praise from the people, support from all parties and solving problems". They have achieved good political, economic, social and environmental effects, which are reflected in the following aspects:

Second, to consolidate the political responsibility for ecological civilization construction. All regions and departments should earnestly improve their political positions, regard supervision as a major political task, a major project for people's livelihood and a major development issue, and effectively implement the principle of "the Party and the government share the same responsibility" and "one post has both responsibilities" for ecological civilization construction and ecological environmental protection.

Third, we will solve a large number of prominent ecological and environmental problems. The inspectors focused on prominent problems and major problems in the field of ecology and environment, cracked down on "hard bones" and eliminated "persistent difficulties", and solved a number of problems that had long sought to be solved but could not be solved. These problems are actually divided into two categories: one is a clear one in the supervision of the rectification scheme to pull a debt to the problem, one is during the supervision of the masses environmental complaint reporting problems. The overall completion rate of 3,294 tasks specified in the first round of inspection rectification plans is nearly 96%. Nearly 60% of 1,227 tasks specified in the first three batches of the second round of rectification plans have been completed. The fourth, fifth and sixth batches of rectification plans are being actively and orderly carried out. A total of 287,000 reports on environmental problems were handled by the public in the two rounds of inspections, and 286,000 cases have been completed or have been completed in stages.

02

What issues will be the focus of the third round of environmental inspection? Where are the opportunities?

China Water Network reviewed the first two rounds of environmental protection inspection, the pipe network, sludge, landfill and other problems are very prominent, investigated and dealt with a number of related illegal activities.

network

And the industry is often said that the phrase is "black and smelly in the water, the root on the shore, the key is the outlet, the core is the pipe network." In recent years, the construction of sewage treatment infrastructure has made great progress, during the "13th Five-Year" period, the national urban sewage treatment rate has reached more than 95%, but pipe network is always the short board of Chinese sewage treatment, pipe network coverage shortage, leakage loss, customer water crowded pipe network, wrong mixing, overflow and other problems exist, This is the main reason why the sewage treatment rate is high, but the sewage collection and treatment rate is still relatively low

In order to solve the problem of pipeline network, in 2021, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" Urban Sewage Treatment and resource Utilization Development Plan (Development and reform Environmental resources (2021) No. 827), which made detailed arrangements for the pipeline network work in the period of "14th Five-Year Plan" and proposed that by 2025, We will basically eliminate direct sewage drains and blank areas for collection and treatment facilities in urban built-up areas, and strive to achieve a centralized collection rate of more than 70 percent of domestic sewage nationwide, and a sewage treatment rate of more than 95 percent in county towns.

E20 Institute pointed out that in 2021, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development published the data on the central collection rate of urban sewage for the first time in the yearbook. The central collection rate of urban sewage in 2021 was 68.6%, and the rate of urban sewage treatment in the same period was as high as 97.89%, the difference between the two indicators was more than 29%, indicating that the sewage collection problem in China is still prominent. The construction, transformation and repair of pipe network during the 14th Five-Year Plan period still need to be paid attention to. According to the 2021 Urban Construction Statistical Yearbook, the total length of urban sewage network exceeded 400,000 km in 2021, with 33,700 km of new urban sewage network in that year, and 4.16 km and 28,200 km in 2020 and 2019, respectively.

"In addition, taking into account the requirements of water environmental management and the planning of sewage recycling system, centralized and decentralized sewage treatment will be planned as a whole, which will bring about a definite change in the layout of the pipeline network."

Waste disposal and disposal

In recent years, although the disposal capacity of domestic waste has been continuously improved throughout the country, and the treatment gap is gradually narrowing, the environmental problems of the stock landfill facilities are increasingly emerging, and it has become a new risk point of the ecological environment. In particular, the leachate treatment is not up to standard, the anti-seepage system is weak, the daily operation is not standard and other environmental hidden dangers are prominent, which pose a potential threat to the surrounding environment. The storage capacity of some landfill facilities is gradually full, the service life is gradually expired, and the difficulty of reconstruction and high cost are the main constraints to promote the consolidation of landfill closure.

According to the E20 Research Institute, the imbalance of incineration and landfill load will bring project opportunities to improve the waste collection and transportation system in the short term, and cross-regional waste incineration treatment opportunities in the long term. Overloaded and overdue operation will bring continuous fine operation management and restoration engineering opportunities for landfill sites.

Industrial waste water

In May 2021, according to the Central Ecological and Environmental Protection Inspection Office, in the second round of the third batch of central ecological and environmental protection inspectors, there are many problems of pollution of the ecological environment, the public reaction is very strong. Among them, more attention has been paid to industrial enterprises illegal discharge of wastewater, tampering with test data or data fraud phenomenon.

Last year, ten departments, including the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, jointly issued the Guiding Opinions on Promoting the resource Utilization of Sewage, proposing to actively promote the resource utilization of industrial wastewater, implement the recycling project of industrial wastewater, and implement the pilot project of scientific and technological innovation for the near zero discharge of sewage. Encouraging industrial enterprises to use reclaimed water, improving the repeated utilization rate, how to better coordinate urban sewage and industrial water, and how to solve the technical difficulties of zero discharge have become the focus of the industry.

E20 said the recycled water market will be released gradually during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. According to the data of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, in 2021, the production capacity of reclaimed water in cities (cities, counties, excluding administrative towns) reached 81.31 million cubic meters/day, an increase of 12.25 million cubic meters/day compared with 2020, an increase of 17.74%. At the same time, the consumption of reclaimed water resources also rose rapidly, and the urban consumption of reclaimed water resources reached 17.61 billion cubic meters in 2021. The growth rate reached 19.24%, and the growth rate will remain relatively fast in the future.

Soil repair

In fact, since the "Soil Ten Articles" kicked off the prelude of soil pollution control, soil pollution control and remediation, soil environmental quality monitoring, soil pollution prevention and control and other related policies and markets have been vigorously. The prevention and control of soil pollution has appeared many times in the past two years.

With the completion of the detailed investigation of soil pollution in China, provinces and cities have successively published and regularly updated the remediation list of contaminated plots: by January 2022, the total number of contaminated plots in China had reached 770.

E20 Institute believes that "Pure land protection" has entered a stage of high-quality development under the guidance of national policies such as "building a beautiful China, rural revitalization, integrated protection and systematic management of mountains, rivers, forests, lakes, grass and sand, and land management and circulation", which is an inherent requirement for the comprehensive construction of a modern socialist country. Strengthening and paying attention to the prevention and control of soil pollution sources is an important sign that the soil remediation industry has entered the stage of high-quality development, which is a strategic shift from "pollution first, treatment later" to coordinated and efficient pollution control. Constantly improve the soil environmental policy system, soil environment and the strict supervision and law enforcement will effectively guarantee the source of soil pollution prevention and control, and the soil environment monitoring test, soil environmental management informationization construction, the application and development of the technology, soil pollution environmental management and restoration of advisory services will become the source of pollution prevention and control work of important support. The continuous improvement of the standard system of soil remediation industry will also promote the continuous maturation of the market mechanism and business model of soil pollution control, so as to promote the rapid development of industrial technology and equipment and the industrialization of achievements.

In addition to the above problems, monitoring data fraud, ineffective disposal of sludge, illegal disposal of construction waste and other issues also need attention.