The Ministry of Housing & Urban-Rural Development and National Development & Reform Commission have just designated Zhuhai as a National Water Saving City.

The city's Ocean, Agriculture & Water Bureau says that so far only Zhuhai and Shenzhen have earned the title in Guangdong Province. The bureau sees it as "an achievement in local ecological civilization construction."

In 2015, Zhuhai's water intake quantity for every 10,000 yuan ($1,453) of GDP was 20.04 cubic meters. The daily living water consumption of urban residents was less than 190 liters per capita with 90 percent of industrial water reused. The city's indicators all met the assessment, with the penetration of water-saving appliances, an up-to-standard industrial wastewater emission rate, and water environmental quality control rate all reaching 100 percent.

Zhuhai a National Water Saving City [File photo]

The bureau successively released a series of urban water conservation normative documents, offering policy basis and institutional guarantees for water saving by law. Forty-five enterprises, 21 organizations, and 17 residential communities were designated as provincial water-savers, bringing the coverage rates to 23 percent of businesses and 9.87 percent of residential communities.

Apart from water conservation, the city also actively explored measures to exploit and utilize unconventional water resources. Zhuhai utilizes over 70 million cubic meters of recycled water annually, and power generation enterprises use more than 2 billion cubic meters of seawater every year by refrigerating seawater and brackish water. Meanwhile, some residential areas also collect rainwater or use treated reclaimed water for greening, which has substantially reduced consumption of freshwater resources.