Shanghai will replace the tanks on 80,000 old fashion toilets, with a 9-liter cistern, in an effort to help relieve the city's water shortage.

Zhou Ya, the chief economic engineer in charge of the city's reform and development, made this remark at a press conference Wednesday.

Shanghai now has 600,000 old fashion toilets, most of which flush 13 to 15 liters of water each time, Zhou was quoted by the China Daily as saying Thursday.

The city has replaced about 50,000 units with water-saving technologies. This has helped the city save 2.1 million cubic meters of water at a cost of 4.05 million yuan (US$499,000).

Zhou said the city would save 8.76 million tons of water each year if all the old units were updated.

That is equivalent to the city’s peak time daily water consumption, and the money saved is the same as the cost of building a new medium-sized water plant.

The city will continue to promote the use of recycled water, along with rain and river waters. The city will also speed up closure of deep wells and strictly control further tapping of underground water.

In addition, Zhou said Shanghai would pay more attention to 500 enterprises, each of which consumes at least 5,000 tons of standard coals each year.

The city will help them renovate and scrap high-consumption facilities and close those with heavy pollution but poor profits.

Zhou also said the city would quicken its steps to scrap high consumption and heavily polluting old vehicles, first in governmental organizations.

(Shenzhen Daily/Agencies September 2, 2005)