Sewage Treatment Equipment Goes Global as Operation Service Model Takes Hold
A series of recent developments points to the same trend: Chinese sewage treatment equipment is moving from selling machines to selling solutions, and from domestic projects to overseas delivery.
On October 9, Wandes announced it won a bid for a 114 million yuan entrusted operation and maintenance service project from Huaneng Changjiang Environmental Protection. The project is located at Xinzhuang Coal Mine in Qingyang, Gansu, with a three-year operating period. The scope covers personnel, operation, daily maintenance, record keeping, water quality testing, and emergency repair to ensure the system runs safely and reliably. The significance lies not in the amount but in the model—operation services lock in three years of revenue, providing more stable cash flow and stronger client retention.
Overseas, Southeast Asia is the main battleground. Qiankun Environmental recently signed a water treatment equipment procurement order with a Malaysian client, covering papermaking wastewater treatment, river restoration, and industrial sewage treatment. The company has already implemented multiple water ecological governance projects in Malaysia, with clients including local manufacturers and environmental engineering service providers. Several clients have formed long-term repeat cooperation.
Fulaiming signed a medical sewage comprehensive treatment project in Vietnam’s Red River Delta, securing nearly 20 million yuan in equipment supply orders for dozens of FLM smart energy-saving integrated sewage treatment units. Medical sewage contains complex pollutants. Vietnam’s Red River Delta has scattered medical institutions, and old equipment suffers from high energy consumption and unstable effluent. Fulaiming’s equipment uses a modular buried structure integrating biological reaction and adsorption processes, capable of degrading organic matter and heavy metals while killing pathogenic microorganisms, with effluent stably meeting Vietnam’s medical sewage discharge standards. The company holds over 50 environmental patents. Its modular, skid-mounted equipment turns complex treatment plants into rapidly deployable standardized products, shifting sewage treatment from “dirty work” to “precision manufacturing”.
Lingzhi Equipment’s Cambodia project carries symbolic weight. Its Cambodia branch signed a 600 m³/day aquaculture wastewater treatment system supply contract with Charles River Laboratories (Cambodia) for $404,190, using a patented combined process of inclined plate sedimentation + AO + MBR + MBBR. This is the first project landed after the branch’s establishment and the first overseas order from its Southwest Environmental Equipment Export Base. The base, located in Yunnan, covers about 28,000 square meters with an annual capacity of approximately 1,000 sewage treatment equipment sets, capable of cross-border supply to Southeast Asia.
Domestic structural adjustments are also advancing. Zhejiang Zhongyong Municipal Landscape Design recently applied for a patent on an integrated rural decentralized sewage treatment device. Its core innovation is a low-temperature enhancement unit. Northern rural areas see sharply reduced biochemical treatment efficiency in winter. The device heats the reaction tank to maintain treatment performance while integrating grid wells, regulating tanks, membrane modules, and advanced treatment components into a single tank.
Technical thresholds in industrial wastewater are rising simultaneously. China MCC5 Group consortium won the EPC contract for the Jiangbei Industrial Park sewage treatment plant water quality optimization project in Hubei, valued at approximately 30.04 million yuan. The project will build an HMF+RO dual-membrane system with a treatment capacity of 10,000 m³/day and RO recovery rate of no less than 50%. The accompanying concentrated water Fenton treatment system uses pH adjustment + Fenton oxidation + neutralization degassing + coagulation sedimentation. Resource utilization of high-salinity, high-concentration industrial wastewater is becoming a rigid demand.
At the policy level, the 15th Five-Year Plan for urban renewal has set clear targets: new and upgraded sewage treatment capacity of 25 million m³/day, and construction or renovation of approximately 175,000 kilometers of drainage pipes and 100,000 kilometers of sewage pipes. More critically, the national level requires establishing a long-term mechanism for unified plant-network coordination. New and renovation projects must be planned at the watershed or district level. Wuhan‘s pilot data shows that the Panlong sewage treatment plant’s influent BOD concentration increased 37.3% year-on-year in 2025, with treated water volume up 23%.
From Wandes’s operation and maintenance contract to Fulaiming’s Vietnam medical sewage project to the plant-network integration mechanism reform, the sewage treatment equipment industry is undergoing structural adjustment. Technical thresholds are rising, business models are lengthening, and market reach is expanding.