Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism will lead preparing International Technical Standards for water recycle. Technical Committee of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was held on January 23 in Tokyo, coordinated by Japanese government. The ministry intends to enhance Japan’s advantage in the industry by establishing international standards of membrane treatment, in which Japanese companies are considered to have the most advanced technologies. The committee aims to complete the process in 2017. Representatives from 18 countries including the US and China besides Japan attended the two-day meeting.

According to the Ministry, low-priced membrane technologies of poor quality are often put on the overseas market, which could spoil the technology’s reliability followed by the shrinking market. Japanese companies, on the contrary, possess the technology of better energy-efficiency and better uniformity.

The global water recycle market is expected to grow to 2.1 trillion yen in 2025 from 0.1 trillion yen in 2007. Since water demands are on the rapid uptrend due to expanding economic growth, waste water purification to domestic and industrial water started to expand in emerging countries in Asia and Middle East. (2014/01/24)