Six national standards administered by the National Technical Committee on Water Reuse Standardization (SAC/TC 618) — including Urban Water Reuse — Reclaimed Water Treatment Guidelines — Design General Rules for Reverse Osmosis Treatment Systems for Municipal Wastewater — have completed drafting and are open for public comment, with feedback due by August 30, 2026. These six standards cover reclaimed water treatment design, safety assessment, decentralized systems and performance evaluation, meaning that China's water reuse sector is accelerating the completion of the "skeleton" of its standards system and providing a comparable "standard anchor" for the industry's high-quality development.

1. Six Standards Outline the Full Technical Landscape

Specifically, the drafts for comment include: Urban Water Reuse — Reclaimed Water Treatment Guidelines — Design General Rules for Reverse Osmosis Treatment Systems for Municipal Wastewater, which focuses on the design points of reverse osmosis systems in municipal wastewater reclamation treatment; Urban Water Reuse — Guidelines for Water Reuse Safety Assessment — Indicators and Methods, which establishes the indicators and methodology for safety assessment; Urban Water Reuse — Guidelines for Decentralized/On-site Water Reuse Systems — Design General Rules, which targets distributed and on-site reuse scenarios; and Parts 2, 3 and 4 of the Guidelines for Performance Evaluation of Water Reuse System Treatment Technology, which respectively address performance evaluation of treatment systems based on greenhouse gas emissions, ozone treatment technology, and ultraviolet disinfection. From design to evaluation, from centralized to decentralized, and from conventional indicators to carbon performance, the standards network is becoming increasingly complete.

2. The Industrial Logic Behind the Standards

The intensive rollout of standards reflects three shifts in the industry. First, from "able to treat" to "treating well and using safely" — safety assessment and performance evaluation are brought to the fore, as both users and regulators care more about the long-term reliability of reclaimed water; second, from "centralized large plants" to diversified "centralized + decentralized" supply — adapting to the needs of different scales such as parks, communities and plant sites, with the decentralized system standards filling this gap; third, from "single-point compliance" to "green and low-carbon across the whole chain" — incorporating greenhouse gas emissions into treatment system performance evaluation, in line with the dual-carbon goals. For enterprises and users alike, standards are both a threshold and an endorsement of trust — technologies and products that comply with the standards will more easily enter government procurement and major projects.

3. The Practical Ground of Benchmarking Against Pioneer Cities

The vitality of standards lies in implementation. Previously, Shenzhen's Longhua District used a social-capital model of "investment in exchange for usage rights" to apply reclaimed water to waste transfer stations, car washes and factory toilet flushing; Shijiazhuang's reclaimed water utilization rate exceeded 60%, linking the three major fields of landscape, industry and municipal miscellaneous use; and Guangdong positioned reclaimed water as a "second water source", with annual utilization jumping to 2.5 billion cubic meters. These practices provide real samples for refining the six national standards and give the standard clauses a more "down-to-earth" reference. When standards and practice form a positive cycle, the reclaimed water industry can truly move from policy-driven to capability-driven.

4. TIANYI TECH's Standards Foresight

TIANYI TECH has long been deeply engaged in wastewater treatment and water reuse, and views standards as the "navigator" for technological innovation. The company can act proactively on two levels: on the one hand, it will calibrate its own process packages and evaluation systems in advance against the six drafts for comment, ensuring that indicators for reverse osmosis design, safety assessment, decentralized systems and carbon performance align with the national standards, turning compliance into competitiveness ahead of time; on the other hand, it will draw on its accumulated engineering practice to feed front-line experience back to the technical committee during the public comment window, incorporating the enterprise perspective into the polishing of the national standards. This "benchmarking + co-building" posture helps TIANYI TECH maintain technical authority on the high-quality track of reclaimed water treatment.

Conclusion

With the August 30 deadline for public comment approaching, the standards, once implemented, will reshape the technical threshold and competitive order of reclaimed water treatment. For a technology enterprise like TIANYI TECH, proactively participating in and thoroughly mastering the standards means turning policy dividends into its own capabilities ahead of time. We firmly believe that the clearer the standards, the more enterprises with genuine systematic capability will stand out.