WWT Infrastructure Lacking As Global Needs for Water Services Rise

December 07, 2016

Wellesley, Mass., Dec 07, 2016 – Since 2013, the scientific, financial and social dynamics of the simple water and wastewater treatment technology industry have profoundly changed. BCC Research reveals in its new report that WWT infrastructure lags behind the global needs for essential water and sanitation services.

Global demand for WWT systems is driven by the need for freshwater, which divides itself among three major applications: agriculture, industry, and domestic sanitation and drinking water.

The global market for water and wastewater technology should reach $72 billion and $92 billion in 2016 and 2021, respectively, reflecting a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.0%. As a category, delivery equipment should reach $32 billion by 2021, up from $25 billion in 2016, demonstrating a five-year CAGR of 5.1%. Instrumentation as a category should total $9 billion and $12 billion in 2016 and 2021, respectively, at a five-year CAGR of 5.9%.

From a scientific perspective, 2016 marked the release of massive new open-source datasets that made it possible to uniformly assess unmet global needs for essential water and sanitation services. Among other things, those datasets revealed that the developing world was failing to keep pace with the need for WWT infrastructure, setting the stage for future public health disasters as populations in poor rural areas continued their decade-long migration toward the economic opportunities that exist in cities.

The economic change was the unexpected shift in the potential availability of funding for infrastructure. Historically, the interest paid for the construction bonds that finance public utilities had remained too low to attract investors beyond the limited circle of those seeking a belt-and-suspenders level of security. By early 2016, central bank policies had led to a profound decline in the interest rates on government bonds, in some cases dipping to negative rates where banks charged investors to hold their money. In that unfamiliar financial environment, even the low returns from utilities became attractive.

The social change can be traced to the rise of social media as a means of bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of news. Through tweets and Facebook postings, the public was made aware of the high personal cost of inattention to the degraded condition of the invisible infrastructure upon which it relied.

"Images of sewage-filled waters near the Rio 2016 Olympic water event venues and the discovery that the child-deforming Zika virus had reached the U.S. reinforced the growing perception that clean water and sanitation required serious attention by national political leaders," says BCC Research analyst James Wilson. "For those familiar with the transformation of the Earth Day movement into a thriving environmental industry, the signs of sweeping change and the economic opportunity that followed in its wake had become evident.”

Water and Wastewater Treatment Technologies: Global Markets (ENV008D) analyzes the wastewater treatment technologies, including delivery equipment, instrumentation, process equipment, and treatment chemicals. The report also forecasts 15 products essential for constructing, maintaining, and operating WWT systems in the 40 top global markets.  Global market drivers and trends, with data from 2015, estimates for 2016, and projections of CAGRs through 2021 also are provided.

Editors and reporters who wish to speak with the analyst should contact Steven Cumming at steven.cumming@bccresearch.com.

Water and Wastewater Treatment Technologies: Global Markets( ENV008D )
Publish Date: Nov 2016    

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