Objective To investigate the status of household environmental sanitation in rural areas of Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China, and to provide a basis for the government to formulate improvement measures.

Methods From 2016 to 2018, a total of 391 households from 105 villages of 7 districts in rural areas of Guangzhou were randomly selected using the stratified random sampling method. One-on-one interviews and on-site questionnaires were used to investigate the general information, the conditions of drinking water, toilet and feces treatment, domestic waste and sewage, and vector control.

Results There were 78 households (19.95%) drank spring water. A total of 385 households (98.47%) had sanitary toilets; discharging into the drainage system (80.31%) was the main way of feces treatment, followed by discharging into ditches, ponds, or rivers (15.60%). A total of 72.38% of the households discarded their domestic waste into garbage pools/cans, and the rest (27.62%) discarded their domestic waste to fixed places around their houses, with no random disposal. The domestic sewage was mainly discharged through drain pipe (44.76%), subdrain (36.83%), and ditch (17.39%), and mainly discharged into disposal plants (40.15%), ponds (31.46%), and rivers (21.23%). There were 257 (65.73%) surveyed households with vector breeding sites around their houses.

Conclusion The household environmental sanitation in rural areas of Guangzhou is good in general, but it is still necessary to strengthen the rural drinking water supply, domestic sewage discharge, and vector-control management.