Qingdao's Reclaimed Water Use Reaches 516 Million Tonnes a Year as Membrane-Based High-Grade Reuse Feeds Industrial Lines

According to Qingdao Daily, as a city structurally short of water, Qingdao has incorporated reclaimed water into its unified water-resource allocation, steadily expanding application scenarios and scale and turning wastewater treatment plants into "water suppliers". Annual reclaimed water use reached about 516 million tonnes in 2025, accounting for over 90% of non-conventional water supply — equivalent to ten Laoshan Reservoirs — with a utilisation rate above 60%, placing the city among the national leaders in both scale and rate.

On the industrial side, the high-grade reclaimed water project at the Haihe River wastewater treatment plant uses an ultrafiltration plus reverse osmosis advanced purification train, delivering reclaimed water to Huadian Qingdao Power Generation for flue-gas desulphurisation and heating-network make-up water, at a volume exceeding one million tonnes per year — a milestone in moving reclaimed water from landscaping use into core industrial process water.

Other representative applications include:

• Urban river ecological replenishment: the Licun and Haipo rivers rely on reclaimed water to maintain ecological base flow, with cumulative replenishment of 488 million tonnes;
• Cascaded industrial-park reuse: Qingdao Haiwan Reclaimed Water uses compliant effluent from the Loushan River plant as a stable source to supply production and municipal water to the low-carbon industrial cluster in Loushan, at roughly 400,000 tonnes per year with full-process online quality monitoring;
• Clean-energy heating: the Licun River reclaimed water clean-energy project applies sewage-source heat pumps plus return-water heating, using over 21 million tonnes of reclaimed water annually and producing more than 500,000 GJ of heat for over 1.2 million square metres of floor area.

On the policy front, three national departments including the National Development and Reform Commission are jointly advancing a three-year action on reclaimed water use in key cities, calling for stronger allocation management, better production-and-transmission infrastructure and broader application scenarios. The recently issued Shandong Provincial Water Security 15th Five-Year Plan explicitly brings non-conventional water sources into unified allocation, accelerates reclaimed water infrastructure, and sets a target of 60% urban reclaimed water utilisation by 2030.

In Qingdao, three municipal departments including the water authority recently issued a joint notice bringing reclaimed water into unified allocation and stipulating that reclaimed water "shall be used on a priority basis" for urban miscellaneous and greening use in areas covered by the network with compliant water quality, while folding it into planned water-use management. Nationwide, urban reclaimed water use exceeded 22 billion tonnes in 2025.