Shanghai will upgrade a wastewater treatment plant to give it a daily sewage disposal capacity of up to two million cubic meters by the end of this year, China Business News reported on Thursday.

The project, expected to be the largest one in Asia of this kind, will cost about 2.2 billion yuan (US$313 million). The project is aimed at improving facilities and expanding scales upon the existing Bailonggang sewage disposal plant, which is located in Pudong area.

General engineer of the plant, Zhao Yide, said the advanced plant will be under test run in June, and will be fully operational at the end of this year. By then, it will be able to treat one third of the total waste water in Shanghai, a city in the Yangtze River Delta.

The report says the scheme will improve the quality of the water discharged into the Yangtze River and help meet the target of reducing the chemical oxygen demand, a measure of water pollution, by 15 percent in 2010 when the city will host the World Expo.

Shanghai Municipal Water Affairs Bureau told the newspaper that the city had 48 sewage disposal plants in 2007, which were able to treat 73 percent of the waste water, and the city aims to boost the disposal coverage to 80 percent by 2010.

(China Daily via Agencies, March 27, 2007)