BERLIN, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- Investments in environmental protection, worth 83 billion euros (92.2 billion U.S. dollars), accounted for 10.1 percent of all investments made by German companies in 2017, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) announced on Thursday.
In 2017, manufacturing companies excluding construction in Germany invested 8.4 billion euros in facilities "to reduce, avoid or eliminate emissions into the environment or enable a more careful use of resources," according to the Destatis.
Investments for such facilities, which comprised "property, plant and equipment for environmental protection," declined 1 percent compared to the previous year, the German statistical office found.
At 3.6 billion euros and a share of 42.7 percent of environmental protection investments, German industry mainly invested in waste water management, in particular sewage treatment and neutralization plants, the data showed.
Investments in the waste water management sector by German companies grew 14.1 percent year-on-year, the statistical office noted.
Overall, German companies increased investments in the waste management sector by 5.8 percent year-on-year to 1.6 billion euros.
The figures from the German statistical office showed that climate protection was the second largest area of investment for companies, with a share of 26.7 percent or 2.2 billion euros in 2017.
At the same time, investments in climate protection fell by 21.4 percent compared with the previous year, "mainly due to a decrease in investments in renewable energies", according to the German statistical office.
Until 2015, the industry's investment volume in renewables in Germany had risen "sharply due to major investments," but since 2016, there had been a continuous decline, Destatis stated.
The German industrial sectors of waste water disposal, energy supply as well as "waste collection, treatment and disposal" and waste recovery accounted for the majority of the environmental protection investments by companies, Destatis found.
According to the German ministry for the environment (BMU), Germany was the European country "in which the most waste water is reprocessed and thus recycled".
More than 96 percent of wastewater from private households and public institutions in Germany gets discharged to nearby sewage treatment plants and cleaned, according to the BMU.
