When the mainland announced that environment protection would be one of its main focuses in the next decade, savvy companies lost no time in jumping on the bandwagon.
One of them was Yardway Group, a new player in the waste water treatment business, which has now joined forces with state conglomerate Beijing Capital to expand into the largely untapped village and township markets.
Less than a third of the area in second-tier and smaller cities have sewage treatment systems, Wang Yongchen, an expert in water protection, said. But environmentalist Wang Yongchen points out that most of the mainland's rural regions do not have a system for collecting sewage treatment fees, a potential challenge for companies in this line of business.
According to Liu Xiaoguang, chief executive of water treatment major Beijing Capital Group, large waste water treatment companies have been reluctant to tap rural markets because of low returns.
'Everyone wants to protect the environment, but the investment and returns don't tally,' Liu said. 'Yardway's new technology might help us overcome this problem.'
Yardway says it holds a patent on something known as magnetic separation technique and is manufacturing mobile sewage treatment facilities that can be carried around rural areas with scattered population. The company says this technique can cut treatment costs by up to 75 per cent.