26 Shocking Photos Of The Pollution In China's Yangtze River

Publish date: 2024-05-17

China's Yangtze River, the third-longest in the world, is now so polluted that nearly half the people who depend on it are without safe drinking water.

The Yangtze River has become one of the most polluted rivers — if not the most polluted river — in the world. Half of China's 20,000 chemical factories are distributed along the Yangtze.China Photos/Getty Images Polluted water flows into the Yangtze River from a stream in Nanjing.China Photos/Getty Images A dead pig lies in a dirty tributary of the Yangtze. As of 2010, agricultural pollution, for instance from animal waste, surpassed industrial waste as China's main pollutant.STR/AFP via Getty Images A view of the Yangtze river from afar in Yichang, Hubei province.Jie Zhao/Corbis via Getty Images Chinese environmental campaigner, Wu Dengming, stands beside a polluted creek that flows into the Yangtze. MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images Water has been a source of both life and death for a generation in Shenqiu country, a region fed by a tributary of the Yangtze. by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images Controlling pollution in China is an enormous undertaking, but the government is working to nonetheless. JungleNews/Wikimedia Commons A man surveys a rubbish dump on the edge of Poyang Lake, China's largest freshwater lake connected to the Yangtze. MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images A boat collects floating garbage at the Wu Gorge (Three Gorges Dam) on the Yangtze River. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images A worker cleans up trash along the banks of the Yangtze near the Three Gorges Dam in Yichang.STR/AFP via Getty Images The Qianximen Bridge and the Grand Theatre (Right) through the smog from across the Jialing River in Chongqing. MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images Workers clean up jetsam near the Three Gorges Dam. Massive flooding on the Yangtze was expected to pose the biggest test for the world's largest hydroelectric dam. STR/AFP via Getty Images A man fishing in a filthy canal in Shenqiu, in China's central Henan province. GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images Through dense smog, one can make out the shape of the Three Gorges dam. Tim Johnson/MCT/Tribune News Service via Getty Images This true-color image over Eastern China was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), flying aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite on Oct. 16, 2002. The scene reveals a thick pall of smoke and haze (greyish pixels) filling the skies as a result of heavy pollution.Wikimedia Commons This photo shows effluents in a water treatment plant at the Boyin leather tannery in Shenqiu. GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images Pollution from a Chinese paper pulp plant.Jacques Langevin/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images A school boy runs ashore after swimming in the polluted Yangtze River in Wuhan, China. Andrew Wong/Getty Images Collecting garbage at Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze.Yoshi Canopus/Wikimedia Commons Garbage thrown into the Yalong River, a tributary of the Yangtze, as it makes its way to the sea. Leisa Tyler/LightRocket via Getty Images Air pollution and fog as seen on May 14, 2017, over the steel city of Wuhan on the Yangtze River.Kevin Frayer/Getty Images A man removes debris from the harbor in Wushan. Getty Images The critically-endangered Yangtze finless porpoise is one of the world's few freshwater porpoise sub-species...and the only aquatic mammal left in the Yangtze.JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images Algae floats in the Hanjiang river, a tributary of the Yangtze, after rain-triggered floods in central China's Hubei province. Algal blooms are often caused by a surplus of nitrogen in a body of water which itself is usually a product of livestock runoff. Nitrogen increases the production of algae which can then use up too much oxygen in a given body of water, choking fish or exposing them to toxins as well.STR/AFP via Getty Images The Qingai River, along the Yangtze, is polluted by a paper mill. Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images View of a rubbish dump on Poyang Lake.MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images

Welcome To The Yangtze: A Source Of Life, And Now Death, For 400 Million Chinese Residents View Gallery

Residents along China's Yangtze River are faced with a deadly choice.

Villagers can either drink its heavily-polluted waters or shoulder the expense of buying bottled water. With that cost often too great and with nearby factories only adding to the pollution, these towns have consequently been branded as "cancer villages," as instances of stomach, throat, and liver-related cancers have affected residents at a rate two to three times China's national average.

The Yangtze is China's largest and the world's third-longest river. It supports over 400 million people and is, unfortunately, perhaps the world's most polluted river accounting for 55 percent of the material that ends up in the adjacent seas and ocean.

This amount of plastic has disastrous consequences for wildlife as well. Animals in the areas surrounding the river have been found with microplastics in their stomachs, slowly killing them.

Wikimedia CommonsThe unaltered stomach contents of a dead albatross chick includes plastic marine debris fed the chick by its parents.

The Chinese paddlefish, for instance, are creatures that have alive since the time of the dinosaurs, having survived more than 200 million years of Earth's seismic shifts. But in the last few decades, these living fossils have gone extinct as a result of the pollution in its native habitat.

Indeed, the situation in the Yangtze is so dire that the prehistoric fish which outlived the dinosaurs has been obliterated by man.

China's Struggle With Pollution

On March 4, 2014, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang declared that China would wage war against the smog. By 2017, he asserted, the government planned to convert homes in major cities from coal-burning heat to natural gas in a bid to reduce carbon emissions.

But roughly four decades of booming economic growth has turned China into the world's biggest carbon offender. The government has been trying to eliminate this pollution without damaging its economy.

This is obviously no simple task. In 2015, a research study by Berkeley Earth found that China's air pollution was responsible for 1.6 million deaths per year. That accounts for 17 percent of all the deaths in the country.

An Al Jazeera report explores how the pollution in the Yangtze is killing people in East China.

There's still a long road ahead for China because while the air is improving, it's still not healthy.

Besides, then there's the whole issue of water pollution.

The Yangtze River Pollution

Wikimedia CommonsA factory along the Yangtze River puts residents at further risk of pollution.

Just ten rivers worldwide account for providing 90 percent of the plastic that winds up in the oceans. The Yangtze was reported at one point to be the worst of them, transporting up to 1.5 million metric tons of plastic into the Pacific. In contrast, the Thames carries about 18 tons of plastic.

The Yangtze's rate of pollution is perhaps matched by Indonesia's Citarum River, whose dense pollutants are contained to a smaller area and whose fish population has dropped off nearly 60 percent since 2008.

The Yangtze is vast; fed by roughly 700 tributaries. All of these contribute to the overall level of pollution that eventually bleeds into the Pacific Ocean. This particular travel pattern of pollutants forms what's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, (GPGP) or the Pacific trash vortex.

Annually, the Yangtze transports 2.5 billion metric tons of goods, making it also the busiest inland river in the world. China's highly-consumerist lifestyle means its waste management system can't keep up with all the single-use plastics it produces and so these products wind up in the waterways. It's pretty much the same story the world over but if things continue at the current pace, then by 2050, the number of plastics in the ocean will outweigh the amount of fish.

This is the same year that a report finds climate change will reach doomsday proportions.

Problems With The Three Gorges Dam

How scientists are managing to study the GPGP.

In addition to the pollution of plastics, the Three Gorges Dam — the world's largest hydroelectric dam — has been damaging the Yangtze since it opened in 2003.

Even before it was built the Chinese government ignored warnings that the proposed dam would become an environmental nightmare that would trigger landslides and potentially damage entire ecosystems. They built it anyway.

Even though the dam lightened the area's output of carbon dioxide, it contributed to close to hundreds of landslides in 2009 and 2010. This is in part because the dam sits on a seismic fault. At current levels, 80 percent of the land in the area is experiencing erosion, depositing about 40 million tons of sediment into the Yangtze annually, which is bad for water quality.

China's Plan To Fight Water Pollution

"Export of Plastic Debris by Rivers into the Sea," by Christian Schmidt et al., in Environmental Science & Technology, 2017.

China's government is taking steps to clean up the toxic river along with other waterways.

However, progress — though notable — is slow. The challenges are plentiful; where will all the plastic go, considering an estimated 60 million plastic containers are used daily and many cannot be recycled?

Also, who will be responsible for enforcing new anti-pollution laws? Water carries pollution across boundaries — therefore different jurisdictions would have to cooperate with each other in order to control the problem in any given area.

This issue brought the government in 2016 to appoint various officials across different levels of government to become "river chiefs." Now, more than 300,000 river chiefs span a four-tier system from provincial to township levels.

"Regarding environmental protection, all of the Yangtze's tributaries matter," China's President Xi Jinping says. "so there is more work to do together."

Next, find out why India has a humungous trash pile as high as the Taj Mahal. Then, read about how New York's toxic smog emergency of 1966 claimed the lives of at least 169 people.