A Chinese official has confirmed that pollution has now rendered a third of the Yellow River unfit for any use.
According to state news agency Xinhua, the Yellow River Conservancy Committee has reported that 4,557.6 km of the river and its tributaries’ total 13,492.7 km length is classified as ‘type-five negative’ polluted. Only 2,174 km was type one or two, and therefore suitable for drinking.
AP explains that registering below level five means “it’s unfit for drinking, aquaculture, industrial use and even agriculture, according to criteria used by the United Nations Environmental Program”.
During the last assessment in 2006, 31% of the 12,510.8 km analysed was type-five negative.
Earlier this year National Geographic rang a long feature on China’s ‘mother river’:
Few waterways capture the soul of a nation more deeply than the Yellow, or the Huang, as it’s known in China. It is to China what the Nile is to Egypt: the cradle of civilization, a symbol of enduring glory, a force of nature both feared and revered.
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But today, what the Chinese call the Mother River is dying. Stained with pollution, tainted with sewage, crowded with ill-conceived dams, it dwindles at its mouth to a lifeless trickle.
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The demise of the legendary river is a tragedy whose consequences extend far beyond the more than 150 million people it sustains. The Yellow’s plight also illuminates the dark side of China’s economic miracle, an environmental crisis that has led to a shortage of the one resource no nation can live without: water.
See also
China dam threatens ‘catastrophe’
Image: Yellow River Mouth, China, 1996 / NASA