Newly released scientific results show one-third of the famed Yellow River, which supplies water to millions of people in northern China, is heavily polluted by industrial waste and unsafe for any use.
The Yellow River, the second-longest in China, has seen its water quality deteriorate rapidly in the last few years, as discharge from factories increases and water levels drop because of diversion for booming cities.
The river supplies a region chronically short of water but rich in industry.
PHOTO: AP
The Yellow River Conservancy Committee said 33.8 percent of the river’s water sampled registered worse than Level 5, meaning it’s unfit for drinking, aquaculture, industrial use and even agriculture, according to criteria used by the UN Environmental Program.
A survey last year covered more than 13,492km of the river, which flows from western Qinghai Province across China into the Bohai sea, and its tributaries, a notice posted on the committee’s Web site on Saturday said.
Only 16.1 percent of the river samples reached Level 1 or 2 — water considered safe for household use.
Industry and manufacturing made up 70 percent of the discharge into the river, the notice said, with 23 percent coming from households and 6.4 percent from other sources. The notice did not identify specific pollutants.
The results showed pollution has gotten slightly worse since 2006, when 31 percent of the water in the river was poorer than a Level 5, according to an earlier survey.
“It’s not surprising,” said Wen Bo of the San Francisco, California-based environmental group Pacific Environment.
Many polluting firms in the upper and middle reaches of Yellow River have not been well monitored by local governments, and even protected because they give jobs to workers, said Wen, who is the organization’s China program director.
There is also no mechanism for richer provinces downstream to help the poorer ones upstream clean up, he said.
“They are just treating the river as a dumping site,” Wen said. “It’s basically a sewage channel for the provinces that share the river.”
Some of the world’s most polluted cities are in China, where many rivers and lakes are toxic after decades of breakneck industrial and economic growth.
In February pollution turned part of a major river system in central China red and foamy, forcing authorities to cut water supplies to as many as 200,000 people.
In one of China’s worst cases of river pollution, potentially cancer-causing chemicals, including benzene, spilled into the Songhua River in November 2005.
The northeastern city of Harbin was forced to sever water supplies to 3.8 million people for five days.
Pollution in China’s waterways remains “grave,” according to a June report by the Ministry of Environmental Protection on the state of the environment last year.
More than 20 percent of water tested in nearly 200 rivers was not safe to use, it said.
The ministry has tried to shut down polluting factories along China’s main waterways, but its power is limited because local environmental protection bureaus are under the control of local governments.
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
At first, Francis Ari Sture thought a human was trying to shove him down the steep Norwegian mountainside. Then he saw the golden eagle land. “We are staring at each other for, maybe, a whole minute,” Sture said on Monday. “I’m trying to think what’s in its mind.” The bird then attacked Sture five more times on Thursday last week, scratching and clawing the 31-year-old bicycle courier’s face and arms over 10 to 15 minutes as he sprinted down the mountain. The same eagle is believed to be responsible for attacks on three other people across a vast mountainous area of southern Norway