Pressures Grow Relentlessly On China's Yangtze River - Guardian

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"Shanghai is the wealthiest and most environmentally conscious city in China, but its thirst has never been harder to quench, nor its effluent harder to manage. In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping first launched his economic reforms, the population of Shanghai was 12 million. Today official figures put it at 13.5 million, although unoficially it is closer to 20 million. Its thickening forest of skyscrapers means that water is now being pumped up to altitudes of more than 400m, while the resultant waste - 5,300,000l a day - spreads out across a 6,500km-long sewage network that Ma's office has expanded at the rate of about 80km a year. Over the next five years, they will build 16 new waste-treatment plants, in addition to the existing 20. And still they can't keep up. More than a third of the city's sewage is dumped in rivers untreated. "The problems are so huge," says Ma, "that sometimes I can't sleep at night."

Meng's job is only partially easier. His workers lay 2km of new pipes every year, while more than six new purification plants have boosted water supply capacity to 7,160,000m3 per day. He earnestly assures me that Shanghai's water is so purified that it is not only drinkable, but among the highest quality urban water in China. I'll take his word for it, but few locals seem to. A glass of Shanghai water is tinted a faint yellow, smells of chlorine and tastes like something you'd rather not swallow - most people boil it, or buy bottled water. Four-fifths of the city's drinking water currently comes from the Huangpu which reflects the bright lights of the Pudong skyscrapers and art-deco colonial buildings on the Bund, but it has become so dirty and expensive to treat that Meng says the city will soon have to start taking half its supplies from the more distant Yangtze. The trouble is that China's environment is being ruined so quickly that even a glass of water from the mighty Yangtze may soon not be much of an improvement.

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It is a familiar story, as more than 200 million peasants have moved off the land and into the cities in the past two decades. These cities may be mere specks on the map, but along the upper reaches of the Yangtze they have populations bigger than Birmingham and waterways as foul as any in Britain's industrial era. Take Chongqing, the next recruitment point for our glass of water, which is now coloured a distinctive chocolate brown from the clay bed. Few Britons are likely to have heard of this bustling city, but it has grown even faster than Shanghai. Thanks to a recent redrawing of boundaries, Chongqing is now the biggest municipality in the world, with a population of more than 30 million. It is also a major polluter. According to the municipal environment records published in the local media, Chongqing pumped out 1.3bn tonnes of waste water last year, 90% of which ran into the Yangtze and other rivers untreated, adding to a contamination corridor that stretches from Sichuan to Hubei province. In the past, the fast-flowing river could clean itself, but the construction of the giant Three Gorges dam hundreds of miles downstream of Chongqing has raised fears that the 600km lake behind it will become a huge cesspool. The government insists that water quality has not deteriorated since the dam was closed last year, but that raises the question of why it is spending £2.8bn on 320 new water treatment facilities in the area. Fisheries officials have no doubt that the ecology has changed.

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The government is aware of the problems. Prime minister Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao have stressed the need for "balanced development", but fine-sounding central government regulations on pollution are easily circumvented in a political climate that mixes regional autonomy, corruption and media censorship. It's not hard to find cases of flagrant violations. This year a China Development Research Institute survey found that more than half of the 394 major waste outlets along the Yangtze failed to meet government standards. Local media report that 50,000m3 of waste from paper-mills fails to reach the safety standards set by the authorities. The 100,000 ships that navigate the Three Gorges every year are legally obliged to dispose of their waste at onshore plants, but an investigation this year by Xinhua News Agency found that nearly 99% of the vessels dump their sewage and oil untreated into the river. Factories and ships are simply the most identifiable sources of pollution. A greater problem is uncontrolled logging on the upper and middle reaches of the river, which has caused hundreds of millions of tons of extra silt to sweep down into the flood plains. On this reclaimed land many of China's new towns and cities are being built, entrepreneurs are establishing fish farms and peasants are over-using fertilisers in their river-side fields. By the time it reaches Shanghai, even Meng admits that it would not be a very good idea to scoop up a glassful of the Yangtze and drink it without treatment - though many impoverished river-side dwellers still do just this. You can't really blame them. At the estuary, the river is so vast that it looks unpollutable, an endless resource, its far banks too distant to be discerned through the coastal haze and the smog from the giant Baoshan steelworks. Here, at its mightiest, the Yangtze pumps out 900bn tonnes of water a year. Yet even this is not enough to dilute the pollution that flows into the East China sea, which has in recent years suffered increasingly frequent "red tides" of algae that stretch for thousands of square kilometres and suffocate fish. The same is true - and in many cases, worse - near the mouths of other Chinese rivers: according to a report by the State Oceanic Administration this year, some offshore areas are now entirely devoid of life."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1348274,00.html