Yangtze River: The Lifeblood of the Country
The longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, the Yangtze carries the most plastic waste to the ocean – 1.5 million metric tonnes every year. The Yangtze River Basin is home to nearly 500 million people. It is the longest in the world to flow entirely within one country. Originating at Jari Hill in Qinghai, it has over 700 tributaries and discharges into the northern part of the East China Sea (Yellow Sea) at Shanghai and Jiangsu. The Yangtze has been the lifeblood of China’s economic success for almost two millennia. Besides serving as the country’s essential irrigation system for the growing of rice since the Han Dynasty, the Yangtze has served as China’s inland water transportation system with the Grand Canal connecting the lower Yangtze with major cities like Wuxi, Suzhou and Hangzhou south of the river in the Jiangnan region to cities like Beijing in northern China. The construction of the Grand Canal and the Lingqu Canal (connecting the upper Xiang River with the Guijiang) allowed trade to flourish across the whole country with the transportation of goods made chiefly by sea before the construction of the national railway across China in the 20th century. The Yangtze River Basin accounts for 40 percent of China’s freshwater resources, more than 70 percent of rice production and more than 70 percent of fishery production. The Yangtze River Delta generates as much as 20 percent of China’s GDP while the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is the largest hydroelectric power station in the world. According to the Yangtze River Water Resources Commission’s 2017 report, annual discharge of sewage and industrial waste into the Yangtze was 35.3 billion tonnes, accounting for 47 percent of China’s total sewage discharge. The agricultural runoff from farms and pollution from industrial belts and high-tech development zones are the main contributors to the poisoning of the Yangtze’s marine species. The extensive loss of floodplains to agriculture has also reduced the Yangtze basin’s ability to detoxify the pollutants deposited into it.
Growing Cities Without Regard for Sanitation
China’s prioritisation of rapid economic growth over steady organic growth of its cities is one of the main contributing factors to the plastic pollution problem found in the Yangtze. In April 2005, China announced a plan to develop city clusters along the middle reaches of the Yangtze River to “create a new economic growth engine” and to promote new urbanisation. These urban clusters around Wuhan in Hubei Province, the Chansha-Zhushou-Xiangtan city group in Hunan Province and around Poyang Lake in Jiangxi Province cover a total of 317,000 square kilometres and is seen as a pillar of the Yangtze River Economic Belt. The State Council of China put forth the strategy, termed the “Rise of Central China”, in 2004 to create an economic belt along the Yangtze to “promote better coordination in industrial development”. Although problems with pollution along the Yangtze have always been endemic, the policy to grow even more urban centres around the Yangtze has definitely exacerbated the problem by overloading the already inadequate waste and sanitation treatment plants found in the cities around the Yangtze. The inability of public sanitation and waste treatment plants to cope with the sheer volume of waste from the many urban clusters along the Yangtze is the main reason why pollution problems continue to be a problem.
“The Yangtze carries the most plastic waste to the ocean – 1.5 million metric tonnes every year. The policy to grow more urban centres around the Yangtze has exacerbated the problem”