David Lague, International Herald Tribune
October 9, 2006

Chongqing: From the heights of this sprawling hillside city, the turbid, coffee-colored waters of the Jialing River, sluggish and drawn low by a once-in-a-century drought, seem an unlikely raw material for a thriving business. But for Sino French Water Development, the river is satisfying a growing thirst for clean drinking water in this municipality of 32 million people in south-central China. Water treatment is becoming a big business across China as demand for clean water expands along with rapid industrialization and a mass migration of people from the countryside to towns and cities. Additional services to treat wastewater are also sorely needed as pollution from agriculture, industry and sewage increasingly contaminates rivers, lakes and dams in a country where per capita water resources are less than a third of the global average. For Sino French, that translates into a billings boom. … Read the full story [PDF].