China lacks sewage facilities
Together with heavy opposition against Beijing hosting the Olympics in 2008 due to increasing air pollution in the country, China faces many other environmental problems. Chinese city officials recently revealed that 278 cities in the country and about more than half the country's populations did not have any sewage facilities.
Estimates say that around 5,000 towns and 20,000 smaller market towns have no sewage treatment facilities and also lack clean drinking water. Chinese environmentalists estimate that the country needed to build more than 1,000 sewage treatment plants.
Meanwhile, sewage treatment is also picking up as a lucrative business with a market of nearly us $50 billion for domestic and foreign investors. Wen Yibo, chief executive officer of Beijing Sound Group, country's leading environment-related enterprise, said his company had signed contracts to build sewage treatment plants in eight cities in the country.