Sustainable wastewater management can only be promoted when the existing situation is well defined. It also necessitates the investigation of the national monitoring and control acts, as without an idea on the national water and wastewater policies it is very hard to establish a healthy and satisfactory management strategy. As a rapidly developing country, Turkey faces certain difficulties in having a well-organized and systematic database concerning especially infrastructure facilities. The major objective of this paper is to identify the prevailing situation of water and wastewater issues to promote sustainable water and wastewater management efforts in Turkey. For that purpose, a detailed data inventory followed by the evaluation of the existing urban wastewater treatment facilities was conducted. The study was solely based on the river basins of the country as basin wide approaches seem to be the most convenient scale to deal with such environmental issues. The characteristics of each basin were found to vary from each other, mainly due to the variations in geographical structure, climatic conditions, the intensity of industrial activities, proximity to the coastlines, and locations within the boundaries of Greater Municipalities. Lack of information and/or reliance on available data together with data scattered among various governmental organizations made the study of improving and re-establishing a sustainable water and wastewater management strategy for the country rather difficult.