Local standards for domestic wastewater treatment in rural areas of China: current situation, problems and suggestion

The water pollution discharge standards of rural domestic wastewater treatment (WWT) facilities are the key to the selection of treatment technologies, construction investment, and operation and maintenance. The scientific and reasonable formulation of discharge standards is of great significance. The applicable scope, classification, selection of pollutant control indicators and limits, and monitoring and sampling methods of local standards for water pollutants discharge from rural domestic WWT facilities that had been issued in 30 provinces in China were compared and analyzed. Some problems were found for the local standards, for instance, the application scope and classification of the standards were unscientific, the index limits were not clearly regionalized, and the monitoring and sampling methods were unclear. Accordingly relevant suggestions were put forward including scientifically formulating classification standards based on functional divisions and processing scales, selecting pollutant control indicators according to local conditions, setting the index limits with lenient and strict policy, further clarifying the monitoring frequency and sampling methods, and strengthening researches on the criteria of standards, in order to provide guidance and reference for improving the rural domestic wastewater standard system.