From the perspective of both production and consumption, this paper constructed an index of environmental resources occupation changes to assess the industrial transfer, and divided it into visible transfer based on the traditional changes of production share and invisible transfer based on the changes of consumption. The transfer among China’s 30 provinces for three major water pollution-intensive industries was analyzed. Results in the period of 2002-2007 show that paper products industry transfers out to the eastern region, and visible transfer is dominant; chemicals industry transfers out to the eastern region as well, but invisible transfer is dominant; while agro-food processing industry transfers out to the central and western regions, and both visible and invisible transfer are significant. Given the different transfer characteristics, policies on industry transfer for different industries should be made discriminatingly in the future.