7th World Conference on Sport and the Environment - International ...

Report
4.9.2. Guaranteeing the safety of water for Green Olympics
Jing Cheng, Vice Director of Beijing Water Authority
To build up clean and beautiful water environment is an important component in the strategic concept
of “New Beijing, New Olympics”. Since its successful application for hosting Olympics Games in 2000,
Beijing has adopted the water treatment concept of achieving harmony between human and water,
followed the water environment standard as required by Olympic Games, speeded up water sources
protection, safe water supply, waste water collection and treatment and water course environment
construction and treatment, and basically fulfilled its commitments for good Olympic water environment
one year ahead of time.
I. Guaranteeing the Quality of Drinking Water
1. Three Defense Lines to strengthen ecological protection in water source zones
Starting from water resource protection and water environment construction, Beijing proposed a new
concept of creating Eco-restoration, Eco-treatment and Eco-protection to build clean micro water
systems. It changed its water source protection and water environment construction strategy from
the old passive model to the new proactive one and successfully found out a new way to protect
biological water environment.
The focus of Eco-restoration is to guide and assist farmers’ resettlement, to close up mountains for
forestation and to fully employ nature’s self-restoration ability to restore the ecology and conserve
water resource. The focus of Eco-treatment is to have simultaneous treatment of waste water, rubbish,
toilets, watercourses and environment in rural areas to avoid rubbish, excrements and waste water
being discharged into rivers. The focus of Eco-protection is to adopt protective biological treatment
measures for water source and watercourses within the system to allow only clean water into rivers.
For over three years, Beijing has built 30 clean bio-friendly small water systems and has treated soil
erosion of more than 900 square kilometres. Rural areas within water source zones have had rubbish
collection and treatment measures in place and basically completed waste water treatment and toilet
improvement.
The Miyun Reservoir is the most important water source zone in Beijing. Three defense lines have
reduced usage of fertilizer and pesticide in water source zones, mitigated pollution burden caused
by production, daily life and tourism and improved the quality of feed-in water. The reservoir area has
adopted measures such as closed management and fry raising, which keep the water quality at Grade
Two for years.
The Guanting Reservoir has built up wetland biological treatment system, where upstream water flows
into the reservoir after wetland sanitization. It has also took rehabilitation measures such as fishing
ban to keep the water quality at Grade Four. Water from the Guanting Reservoir to Sanjiadian has
reached Grade Three for surface water whole year.
2. Meeting national and WHO drinking water quality requirement
Beijing has two water supply systems. One is surface water supply system representing by the Miyun
Reservoir and the Huairou Reservoir. The other is underground water supply system whose source
comes from underground water. There are 87 water plants in the city, 19 of which are in urban areas
with a daily supply capacity of 2.75 million cubic meters. Total length of urban water supply network
is 6,621 kilometers covering eight districts of the city. In order to ensure safe operation of pipe
networks, Beijing has installed 1,837 leakage inspector and recorders, which further improved the
monitoring system for pipe network leakage and the ability to detect potential accidents. The accident
rate of pipe network has been reduced by 5%. In order to secure safe and stable water supply by
high-level building secondary water supply facilities, within two years Beijing has completed 1,217
transformations on secondary water supply facilities and eradicated hidden danger for possible
secondary pollution.
Beijing has set up a tap water quality monitoring system following the directive values in national and
WHO requirements of drinking water quality, where enterprise self-inspection and industrial monitoring
and government administrative measures are combined to set up a water supply quality monitoring
network. The quality of supplied water strictly follows National Hygiene Standards for Drinking Water
and completely meets WHO requirements as committed in the application for hosting Olympic
<strong>7th</strong> <strong>World</strong> <strong>Conference</strong> on Sport and the Environment
International Cooperation and Development Dept.
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