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 a growing part of water management in the Middle East and North Africa.

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, typically for 25 to 30 years.

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; its own auditor calls this the world’s highest rate, for agricultural reuse, with Spain second at about 30% of effluents.¹ 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.² Reuse is a separate question, and averaging it across the Gulf hides more than it shows.

Take the three best-documented cases. Qatar’s Public Works Authority, Ashghal, reported in July 2026 that it had treated and reused 98% of wastewater cumulatively, 3.46 billion cubic metres in all, with 32% allocated to green-space irrigation, 31% to fodder, 22% injected into aquifers and 14% stored in seasonal lagoons.³ Oman’s statistics office recorded 119.5 million cubic metres of treated wastewater in 2024, of which 59.3 million was consumed and 54.8 million discharged into the sea.⁴ Tunisia treated 295.7 million cubic metres in 127 plants in 2024, 99.2% of what it collected, but collection covered only 65.6% of the population, and reused 57.6 million cubic metres in 2023, about a fifth of the treated volume, of which 10.89 million went directly to irrigation.^5 6

Egypt has built the largest treatment plants on the planet. Bahr El-Baqar, which treats a drain carrying mixed agricultural drainage, industrial waste and sewage,⁷ was certified by Guinness at 5.6 million cubic metres a day, built for LE 20 billion and irrigating 1,400 km² in Sinai.⁸ 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.⁹ In Libya and Yemen, 14.4% and 28.1% of domestic wastewater flows were safely treated on the latest reported figures.²

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 for agricultural irrigation.¹ Shafdan, run by Mekorot, is the anchor: the effluent is treated at the plant and then pumped into the aquifer for further natural treatment, and the Third Line carries about 140 million cubic metres a year south to farmers in the Negev.¹¹

The transferable part is not the technology. It is that the reuse was planned as supply, with named users and a delivery route such as the Third Line. 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 about 90% of Jordan’s treated wastewater back into use, 167 of 186 million cubic metres in 2021, mainly for irrigation in the Jordan Valley,¹² and 77.4% of domestic flows were safely treated in 2024 on the United Nations series.² 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.¹³

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 365,000.¹⁴ 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.^13 15 Its effluent reaches the King Talal reservoir, blends with Zarqa basin flow and irrigates about 20,000 hectares of the Jordan Valley.¹³ Grants kept the capital cost off household tariffs, which the case study says the finance model kept very affordable.¹³

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.¹⁶ In June 2025 Saudi Arabia was reported to treat over 6.5 million cubic metres of municipal wastewater a day and to reuse around 25% of it,¹⁷ against 58.4% of domestic flows safely treated in 2024.²

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.¹⁸ 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 together with a US$650 million, 26-year loan 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.¹⁹

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

Bahr El-Baqar treats water from a drain carrying agricultural runoff, industrial waste and sewage.⁷ 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.⁸

Its limit is salinity. A 2026 modelling study by Benha University and National Water Research Centre researchers estimates baseline dissolved solids at the plant’s feeder at about 2,200 ppm, already above the 2,000 ppm limit for drainage water reused for irrigation under Law 48/1982 on the protection of the Nile, as amended by Ministerial Resolution 208 of 2018. Under a 50% cut in freshwater allocation the same node exceeds 3,000 ppm, while a second node, the Bilad El-Ayad pump station on another drain, stays below the limit, so the problem is node-specific rather than catchment-wide. The authors point to earlier studies in which membrane pretreatment cut dissolved solids by up to 82% and upstream source control by about 76%.²⁰

Where treatment barely exists

Conflict-affected and lower-income countries still discharge much of what they produce.² On 8 May 2025 Lebanon’s Council for Development and Reconstruction advertised prequalification for a design-build-operate contract to expand and upgrade the Al-Ghadir wastewater treatment plant under Islamic Development Bank financing, with applications due on 24 June 2025.²¹

This is where reuse shares should be read most carefully: a country that collects little sewage can post a high share of treated effluent reused on a very small volume.

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. Hover, tap or focus a country, toggle the metric, see countries ranked, and download the data or a citation for your own work.

This map shows the wastewater treatment, reuse and sewerage projects in our register, large and small. It is not a complete inventory of the region’s plants. 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 Sharakat (formerly 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).²² 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 digestion and biogas-to-energy offset plant power at As-Samra and Saudi Arabia’s newer independent sewage treatment plants.^13 23 Decentralised plants serve smaller and rural settlements: a GIZ regional programme piloted decentralised treatment in Jordan, Morocco and Egypt between 2012 and 2017.²⁴

• Membrane bioreactors (MBR) 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
• Sludge-to-energy and biogas to cut plant operating cost
• Decentralised modular plants for towns and settlements²⁵

Reuse is only as good as the effluent, and Israel’s system, closely audited, is 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 regulations’ standard for discharge to streams.¹

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 2028.¹ In the West Bank, about 84 of the 124 million cubic metres produced in 2022 were discharged untreated.¹

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.^26 20 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.^13 26

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.¹ 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:

The published comparisons, mostly from the Gulf, put reuse well below the cost of desalinated water. Abu Dhabi’s recycled water was reported at AED 1.9 a cubic metre, about US$0.52, against AED 10.2, US$2.77, for desalinated water.²⁶ Kuwait’s Sulaibiya sold treated wastewater at KD 0.18, US$0.66, a cubic metre, against a desalination production cost of KD 0.62, with annual savings put at US$213 million.²² MEED reported that treated sewage effluent typically cost US$0.15 to 0.20 a cubic metre, against about US$1 for desalinated water.²² The MEED figures date from 2011.

What makes a scheme bankable is an offtaker next door and a structure that moves risk. As-Samra reports full recovery of operation and maintenance costs of about US$1.3 million a month, generates up to 95% of its energy and reduces its carbon footprint by about 300,000 tonnes of CO2e a year; the case study lists a post-tax internal rate of return of 10 to 18% (to be confirmed) and a bank-loan repayment period of 13 to 20 years.¹³ Three Saudi independent sewage treatment plants, at Tabuk, Buraydah and Madinah, source more than half of their energy needs internally through biogas-to-energy and on-site solar.²³ Umm Al Hayman is governed by a Transmission and Sewage Treatment PPP Agreement rather than a water-purchase agreement.¹⁹

District cooling is the demand story to watch. Qatar Foundation converted its Education City district-cooling central plants, more than 152,000 tons of refrigeration, to treated sewage water for condenser cooling, saving 98% of the drinking water previously used; district cooling itself saves about 40% of electricity against traditional cooling.³³ In Abu Dhabi, the Al Wathba-2 reuse project was expected to replace 125,000 cubic metres a day of desalinated water and the costs of maintaining and operating more than 1,000 groundwater wells.²⁶

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)Drainage and sewerage infrastructure · Qatar
• Nama Water Services (ex-Diam and Haya Water)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 aims to increase reuse of treated water to 95% by 2036, while Qatar reports treating and reusing 98% of its wastewater.^16 3 Agricultural drainage-water reuse is practised at large scale in Egypt and on a more limited scale in Iraq.³⁵ As-Samra can generate up to 95% of its energy needs and reduce its carbon footprint by about 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year.¹³

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: ONAS reported a 65.6% public-network connection rate in 2024.⁵ Conveyance and demand again, because collected water can still go to waste: Oman’s plants discharged 54.8 million of the 119.5 million cubic metres they treated in 2024 into the sea.⁴ 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.

• World Health Organization, Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality, fourth edition incorporating the first, second and third addenda (2026). The benchmark for drinking-water quality. who.int
• World Health Organization, Guidelines for the safe use of wastewater, excreta and greywater, third edition (2006), in four volumes. 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