Wastewater & Water Reuse

For a region running a structural water deficit, wastewater is the one resource that grows with the population rather than shrinking with the climate. Every city produces it. Treated and reused, it offsets freshwater abstraction for agriculture, industry, district cooling and landscaping. That makes reuse the fastest-growing non-conventional resource in the Middle East and North Africa, and increasingly a core part of national water strategies from Riyadh to Rabat.

For companies, it is also where a large share of the region's bankable water pipeline now sits. Sewage treatment and reuse plants are being delivered through the same public-private-partnership machinery that built the Gulf's desalination fleet. Offtake is long-term, and the pool of lenders keeps widening.

The regional record is better than it was and thinner than the headlines suggest. Israel treated about 95% of the wastewater it produced in 2020, 592 million cubic metres, and reuses over 80% of the resulting effluent, which is the highest rate anywhere; its own auditor names Spain second, at about 30% of effluents.² Everywhere else, treatment and reuse are two different numbers, and the gap between them is where the opportunity sits.

Progress is uneven, and the two measures that matter move separately. On the United Nations’ own indicator, the share of domestic wastewater safely treated in 2024 ran from 100% in Kuwait, 99.9% in Qatar and 95% in the UAE and Israel down to 58.4% in Saudi Arabia, 41.8% in Iraq and 26.4% in Iran; Lebanon, Syria and Oman report no value at all.¹ Reuse is a separate question, and averaging it across the Gulf hides more than it shows.

Take the three best-documented cases. Qatar reports 3.46 billion cubic metres treated and reused cumulatively to 2026, a 98% treatment-and-reuse rate, with the treated effluent split 32% to green space, 31% to fodder, 22% injected into aquifers and 14% held in seasonal lagoons.¹⁵ Oman’s 58 plants produced about 92.9 million cubic metres, of which 48.8 million was used and 37 million discharged unused.¹⁴ Tunisia treated 295.7 million cubic metres in 127 plants in 2024, 99.2% of what it collected, but collected from only 65.6% of the population, and reused 57.6 million cubic metres in 2023, a fifth of the treated volume, with under 11 million going directly to irrigation.¹²¹³

Egypt has built the largest treatment plants on the planet. Bahr El-Baqar, which treats agricultural drainage rather than municipal sewage, was certified by Guinness at 5.6 million cubic metres a day, built for LE 20 billion and irrigating 1,400 km² in Sinai.⁹ The New Delta plant at El-Hammam, completed in 2023, is larger still at 7.5 million cubic metres a day, irrigating about 500,000 feddans.¹⁰ Conflict-affected and lower-income countries, meanwhile, still discharge most of what they produce: 14.4% of Libyan and 28.1% of Yemeni domestic flows were safely treated on the latest reported figures.¹

Computed as the share of domestic wastewater safely treated, from SDG indicator 6.3.1 (2024), multiplied by the share of treated effluent reused, which is sourced nationally where a figure exists and is an in-house estimate otherwise.¹ Read it as an order of magnitude: a country that collects little sewage can post a high reuse share of a very small number.

What sits behind each position

Israel: reuse as the second half of the water system

About 600 million cubic metres a year enter the sewers, 592 million were treated in 2020, and over 80% of the resulting effluent is reused, mostly irrigating the Negev.² Shafdan, run by Mekorot, is the anchor: effluent is recharged to an aquifer for soil-aquifer treatment rather than polished in a plant, and the Third Line carries about 140 million cubic metres a year south to farmers.³

The transferable part is not the technology. It is that the reuse was planned as supply, with a named user and a delivery route, before the treatment capacity was built. The country’s own auditor is franker about the rest of the system than most of its admirers are: see the compliance section below.

Jordan: the most complete loop, on the least water

Ministry reporting puts over 90% of the effluent Jordan’s plants produce back on farms, and 77.4% of domestic flows were safely treated in 2024 on the United Nations series.¹ Collection is the limit: about 63% of the population was connected in 2013, with the rest on septic tanks and cesspits, and treated volume was then about 137 million cubic metres a year.⁶

As-Samra carries most of it, on an extended 25-year build-operate-transfer basis, phase one from April 2008 at 267,000 cubic metres a day and phase two to 365,000.⁴ The Millennium Challenge Corporation put US$93 million into a US$275 million expansion against US$148 million of bank debt on a 20-year tenor, the longest Jordanian banks had then offered, and Jordan itself at least US$19.8 million.⁶⁵ Its effluent reaches the King Talal reservoir, blends with Zarqa basin flow and irrigates about 20,000 hectares of the Jordan Valley.⁶ Grants kept the cost off a tariff Jordanian households could not have paid, which is the part most often left out.

The Gulf: scaling through concessions, with reuse targets ahead of reuse

The targets are set high and the reuse rates behind them vary widely. The UAE’s Water Security Strategy 2036 commits to 95% reuse of treated water; Saudi reuse was put at 18% of treated effluent in the last figure traceable to a named source, against 58.4% of domestic flows safely treated in 2024.²⁵²⁶¹

Kuwait’s Sulaibiya took 100 million gallons a day in and produced 85 million reclaimed, expandable to 160, under a 30-year concession awarded in May 2001 and in full operation from December 2004: the largest membrane-based reuse scheme of its time.⁷ Umm Al Hayman is the current template, at 500,000 cubic metres a day of average inflow under a partnership agreement signed on 23 January 2020, financed six days later with a US$650 million loan over 26 years from a six-bank group, and owned 50% by the partnership authority, 40% by a German and Kuwaiti consortium and 10% by the Kuwait Investment Authority.⁸

Egypt: the largest plants on earth, and the constraint they do not remove

Bahr El-Baqar treats agricultural drainage rather than municipal sewage. The state and Guinness put it at 5.6 million cubic metres a day, 64.8 cubic metres a second, at a cost of LE 20 billion, with ozone in the train; ACCIONA’s own project page gives 5.0 million, and both figures circulate.⁹

Its limit is salinity. Egypt’s Nile Research Institute and Drainage Research Institute reported in 2026 that water reaches the plant’s feeder at about 2,200 ppm of dissolved solids, already above the 2,000 ppm reuse limit set by Environmental Law 48/1982 as amended by Ministerial Resolution 208 of 2018. Under a 50% water-reduction scenario the same node exceeds 3,000 ppm, while a second node upstream stays under the limit, so the problem is node-specific rather than catchment-wide. The authors model membrane pretreatment cutting dissolved solids by up to 82%, and upstream source control by about 76%.¹¹

Where treatment barely exists

Conflict-affected and lower-income countries still discharge much of what they produce. Lebanon’s Ghadir plant reached procurement on 8 May 2025, when the Council for Development and Reconstruction advertised a design-build-operate contract for its expansion and upgrade under Islamic Development Bank financing, with bids due on 24 June.²⁴

This is where the reuse figures in the chart above should be read most carefully: a country that collects little sewage can post a high reuse share of a very small number.

Two schemes in this sector, examined in full: what was built, what it cost, what worked and what did not.

Our interactive dashboard maps wastewater treatment and reuse across all twenty countries. Toggle the metric, compare countries side by side, and download the data or a citation for your own work.

Reuse is expressed as a share of treated wastewater; values are best-available estimates.

The region has thousands of wastewater treatment plants; this map shows only the major regional facilities we track: the large, nationally significant plants (broadly those above roughly 100,000 m³/day or of strategic importance), not the many smaller municipal works. Hover or focus a marker for the plant and its status; click through to the full projects register.

The largest tracked wastewater and reuse projects, and the structured procurements coming next, straight from our databases.

Projects

In procurement

Wastewater reuse in the region is delivered through a handful of repeatable structures: build-operate-transfer (BOT) and build-own-operate (BOO) concessions with a government offtaker; independent sewage treatment plants (ISTP), the model Saudi Arabia's SWPC now uses; and EPC + O&M for publicly financed plants. Three landmark schemes show the range:

The treatment side runs from conventional activated sludge to membrane bioreactors (MBR and MABR). Tertiary filtration and disinfection then produce reuse-grade water. At the high end sits indirect potable reuse, in which treated water is banked in an aquifer before re-abstraction. Sludge-to-energy and biogas increasingly offset plant power, while digital SCADA and AI-driven operations improve reliability and safe-reuse compliance. Decentralised modular plants are extending service to smaller towns and settlements.

• Membrane bioreactors (MBR / MABR) for compact, high-quality treatment
• Tertiary filtration + UV/chlorine disinfection for reuse-grade effluent
• Reverse osmosis + ultrafiltration for the highest reuse grades (e.g. Sulaibiya)
• Managed aquifer recharge for indirect potable reuse
• Sludge-to-energy and biogas to cut plant operating cost
• Decentralised modular plants for towns and settlements

Reuse is only as good as the effluent, and the best-documented system in the region is also the most candid about its failures. Israel’s State Comptroller reported that 115.45 million cubic metres, 17.5% of total effluents, were discharged to the environment in 2020, up 72% on 2010, and that 12.3 million cubic metres of that was raw sewage. About 88% of what was discharged failed the effluent quality regulations.²

Capacity is the underlying problem. The regulations required large plants to reach tertiary treatment by 2015; in 2021, 40 of the 87 largest plants had not, producing about a third of large-plant effluent, and about 40% of effluents were treated in 13 plants running above their design capacity. On the land authority’s own data, plant capacity put about 116,000 planned housing units at risk to 2028.² In the West Bank, about 84 of the 124 million cubic metres produced in 2022 were discharged untreated.²

Two quieter risks recur across the region. The first is salinity arriving at the plant rather than leaving it: seawater seepage into Abu Dhabi’s collection network raises raw wastewater salinity to 3,000 to 4,000 ppm, which the treatment train does not remove, the same failure mode Egypt reports at Bahr El-Baqar.¹⁸¹¹ The second is what happens to the solids: As-Samra produced 118 tonnes of dry sludge a day in 2011, heading for 194 by 2025, with storage treated as temporary pending a disposal standard, and Al Wathba-2’s 13,859 tonnes of biosolids in 2020 appear in its own case study both as a discharge problem and as a composting opportunity.⁶¹⁸

Micropollutants are the open scientific question. Studies found drug-derived compounds in crops irrigated with effluent and at low concentrations in the people who ate them; researchers judged the risk negligible, but Israel’s health ministry had not carried out a comprehensive risk assessment.² Any reuse programme that scales past landscape irrigation will meet this question, and the answer will be regulatory before it is technical.

Reuse projects live or die on water-quality compliance. The key reference standards a developer will meet:

Instruments as recorded in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean compendium, the regulators' own texts and the comparative literature; confirm current requirements with the national regulator.

Sources: WHO EMRO’s compendium of regional reuse standards¹⁹; the comparative study of the Egyptian code²⁰; Abu Dhabi’s own regulations, which also set a Legionella limit of 100 CFU/ml where recycled water feeds chilled-water cooling plants¹⁷; and the Egyptian salinity instrument as cited by the Nile Research Institute.¹¹

Reuse is usually the cheapest incremental water in the region, and the published comparisons are stark rather than marginal. Abu Dhabi’s recycled water was costed at US$0.051 a cubic metre against US$2.77 for desalinated water in the same emirate.¹⁸ Kuwait’s Sulaibiya sold reclaimed water at KD 0.18, about US$0.66 a cubic metre, against a desalination production cost of KD 0.62, with annual savings put at US$213 million.²⁶ Treated effluent in the Gulf was priced at US$0.15 to 0.20 a cubic metre against about US$1.00 for desalinated water in the same survey.²⁶ The numbers are dated; the ratio has not reversed.

What makes a scheme bankable is an offtaker next door and a structure that moves risk. As-Samra runs at full cost recovery on operations, about US$1.3 million a month, generates up to 95% of its own energy and cuts roughly 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year; its expansion carried a post-tax internal rate of return of 10 to 18% and a payback of 13 to 20 years.⁶ Saudi Arabia’s newer sewage plants are designed to meet more than half their own energy needs from biogas and on-site solar.²² Umm Al Hayman runs on a transmission and sewage-treatment partnership agreement rather than a water-purchase agreement, which is the more accurate description of how these contracts allocate risk.⁸

District cooling is the demand story to watch. Qatar Foundation converted its Education City cooling plants, about 185,000 tons of refrigeration, entirely to treated sewage effluent, conserving 98% of the drinking water previously used and cutting electricity by about 40%.¹⁶ In Abu Dhabi, the Al Wathba-2 plant was expected to displace 125,000 cubic metres a day of desalinated water and the operating cost of more than a thousand groundwater wells.¹⁸

For developers, contractors, technology providers and lenders, the wastewater and reuse market clusters around a handful of repeatable, bankable opportunities:

The bodies that commission, regulate or deliver in this sector, and the names that recur across its tenders.

• National Water Company (NWC)Utility · Saudi Arabia
• Public Works Authority (Ashghal)Infrastructure delivery · Qatar
• Nama Water Services (ex-Diam)Utility · Oman
• Ministry of Water & Irrigation (MWI)Ministry · Jordan
• Holding Company for Water & Wastewater (HCWW)Utility · Egypt
• ONASUtility · Tunisia
• MetitoDeveloper / operator · United Arab Emirates
• VeoliaDeveloper / operator · Regional
• SUEZDeveloper / operator · Regional

Mandates, procurement routes and the rest of the region’s institutions are in the decision-maker directory.

Expect reuse rates to keep climbing, from very different starting points. The UAE is committed to 95% reuse of treated water by 2036, Qatar already reuses almost all of its treated effluent, and agricultural drainage reuse is scaling further in Egypt and Iraq.²⁵¹⁵ Climate finance rewards the carbon savings of reuse over desalination, and As-Samra shows why: 95% energy self-sufficiency and about 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent avoided a year.⁶

The binding constraints are unchanged and unglamorous. Conveyance, because effluent is produced where people live and needed where crops grow. Collection, because a country cannot reuse what it never catches: a third of Tunisians in serviced municipalities were still unconnected in 2024, and Oman discharged 37 million cubic metres unused.¹²¹⁴ Compliance, because the reuse case collapses the first time a crop fails a test. And, for lower-income countries, the capital to build treatment at all.

Standing references for this sector. Every one is a real work and every link was checked.

• World Health Organization, Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality, fourth edition with addenda (2022). The quality benchmark reuse standards are written against. who.int
• MIGA project record for the As-Samra expansion, Jordan. Phase dates, capacities, sponsors and the grant structure behind the region’s best-known reuse concession. miga.org
• FAO AQUASTAT, the standing database of national water resources, withdrawals and irrigated area. The denominator behind most figures on this site. fao.org
• Smart Water Magazine, the trade record for regional plant awards, commissioning and operating contracts. smartwatermagazine.com