http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1089230/Chinas-Yellow-River-unsafe-use-high-pollution-level.html

A third of China's fabled Yellow River, which supplies water to millions of people in the country's north, is heavily polluted by industrial waste and unsafe for any use, according to new scientific data.

The Yellow River, the second-longest in China after the Yangtze, 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.


Warning: New scientific data claims a third of China's Yellow River is heavily polluted by industrial waste

The Yellow River Conservancy Committee said 33.8 per cent of the river's water sampled registered worse than level five, meaning it's unfit for drinking, aquaculture, industrial use and even agriculture, according to criteria used by the UN Environmental Program.

A 2007 survey covered more than 8,384 miles 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 website on Saturday said.

Only 16 per cent of the river samples reached level one or two - water considered safe for household use.

Industry and manufacturing made up 70 per cent of the discharge into the river, the notice said, with 23 per cent coming from households and 6.4 per cent from other sources. The notice did not identify specific pollutants.

The results showed pollution has got slightly worse since 2006, when 31 per cent of the water in the river was poorer than a level five, according to an earlier survey, although only 7,774 miles was measured then.

'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 the Yellow River have not been well monitored by local governments or protected because they give jobs to workers, said Wen, who is the organisation'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.'

China's State Council, the Cabinet, launched a nationwide campaign to reduce the discharge of pollutants from industrial companies in the second half of last year in an effort to start solving the problem, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Even so, the government still faces an uphill task. For one, said Wen, it must make environmental protection a priority and allow the public and media to reveal polluting firms.

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 3.8million 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 in 2007. More than 20 per cent 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.


.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-11/24/content_10401878.htm

Bulletin: Pollution worsens on Yellow River system


www.chinaview.cn 2008-11-24 00:24:04 Print


ZHENGZHOU, Nov. 23 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese water resources official on Sunday called on people to improve the awareness of water saving and protection in a bid to curb pollution of rivers from spreading and worsening.

Li Xiaoqiang, chief of publicity section with the Yellow River Conservancy Committee, made the remark over the phone while commenting on the fact that pollution had spread to one third of the Yellow River system.

With a mainstream of 5,464 km, the Yellow River, billed as the "mother river" of China, originates from Qinghai province, flows eastward through Sichuan and Gansu provinces, Ningxia Hui and Inner Mongolia autonomous regions, and Shaanxi, Shanxi and Henan provinces before emptying into the Bohai Sea from Shandong Province in east China. It has 35 main tributaries.

The Yellow River Conservancy Committee said in a bulletin released last Thursday that it monitored the mainstream of the Yellow River and its tributaries last year, with the combined length totaling 13,492.7 km, and found 4,557.6 km, or 33.8 percent of the waterways monitored, to have polluted water classified as type-five negative.

The Yellow River Conservancy Committee is an organization affiliated to the Ministry of Water Resources and has its headquarters in Zhengzhou, capital of central China's Henan Province. It is assigned with the mission to overseeing the welfare of the Yellow River system.

Only 2,174 km of the waterways, or 16.1 percent of the river sections monitored, were said to have water quality classified as types one and two, both standards suitable for drinking.

The bulletin also showed that the river system had an increase of 18.9 percent in rainfall last year in comparison with that of 2006, but received more pollution too: waste and sewage water discharged into the river system totaled 4.29 billion tonnes last year.

Industrial sector was blamed as the No.1 polluter, followed by living sewage contributed by urbanites living along the river system and the service trade.

In 2006, the organization monitored 12,510.8 km of the Yellow River system, of which, 31.1 percent were found to have type-five negative water. And 4.26 billion tonnes of waste and sewage water was discharged in the Yellow River system in that same year.

The Yellow River and its legions of tributaries flow through arid north China, making the river system hard to clean on its own, said Li.

The State Council, China's Cabinet, launched a nationwide campaign among industrial enterprises to save energy and reduce the discharge of pollutants enormously in the second half of last year.

"It is a good thing though it takes arduous efforts too," said Li. "I wish a harmony could be achieved between development, utilization, and protection of the river someday."

.

Well call it "Green river" and make it a tourist attraction...


__________________________________________
No Matter Who Wins, our troops are always in Good Hands!

Not Green river, Red.





.

This is really unfortunate, the price to pay for economic development. The Central Gov intends to clean up the pollution but then because corruption is still rampant at lower local levels its hard to enforce regulations.

Wtf turns it red? You would be forgiven to think that is blood.

Siege of Tobruk - One German POW said: "I cannot understand you Australians. In Poland, France, and Belgium, once the tanks got through the soldiers took it for granted that they were beaten. But you are like demons. The tanks break through and your infantry still keep fighting." Rommel wrote of seeing "a batch of some fifty or sixty Australian prisoners ... marched off close behind usimmensely big and powerful men, who without question represented an elite formation of the British Empire, a fact that was also evident in battle."

Doesn't look like algae either. So possibly dye or something similar.

Needs another round of checking by the central government, although with a photo and news on this they sould deal with this problem now.

industrial discharge....

-------------------------------------------------