ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Water and Wastewater Management
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1576420
Influencing effects and spatiotemporal differentiation of pollutant discharge from industrial wastewater and domestic sewage in China
Provisionally accepted
- Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory for Subtropical Resources and Environment, School of Geographical Sciences, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China
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The driving forces and their spatio-temporal differences of pollutants discharge of thirty provinces in China from 2001 to 2020 were investigated by adopting the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) method, distinguishing between industrial and living wastewater pollutants discharge individually. Our study results show that economic scale expansion was the dominant driver of COD and NH3-N discharge in China, mainly due to the impact of rapid economic development of the developed eastern provinces. The gap among 30 provinces of the contribution related to the driving effects of industrial COD and NH3-N discharge was greatly narrowing with time, tending to the national average. It showed significant effectiveness of industrial structure adjustment, clean production and the technology of industrial wastewater treatment across the country. Industrial COD and NH3-N discharge has reduced to a certain extent. However, with rapid economic growth and urbanization, the domestic sewage treatment volume was still increasing, and the growth rate was faster than that of GDP in some provinces. The technology of many provinces had gradually failed to meet the growing demand for domestic sewage pollutants treatment. Consequently, the influencing contributions had significant regional differences among provinces. The governance of water environment in China should attach importance to the technology advance for living water saving and domestic wastewater treatment in future.
Keywords: COD/NH3-N discharge, industrial and domestic pollution, influencing effects, spatiotemporal differentiation, the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index Method
Received: 13 Feb 2025; Accepted: 30 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Liu, Lan, You and Ye. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chen Zhang, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory for Subtropical Resources and Environment, School of Geographical Sciences, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China
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