Millions of tonnes of rural refuse are dumped in waterways a year, bill says

Many were shocked when thousands of dead pigs were found floating on Shanghai's Huangpu River this month, but animal carcasses are not the only things that end up in the nation's waterways.

Rivers and lakes are among the major dumping sites of some 190 million tonnes of household waste generated in rural areas every year, most of which are casually dumped without being recycled or properly treated, according to a bill submitted to the annual session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in Beijing last week.

Research by the China Association for Promoting Democracy, one of the mainland's eight non-communist political parties, shows that most household refuse in the rural areas is piled on the side of roads, dumped under bridges, in fields or on river banks, or simply burned.

Researchers said the variety and amount of rural waste had risen markedly over the past decade as living standards improved.

In rural areas, household refuse used to comprise mainly of kitchen waste and ash from burning coal or firewood, but Wang Jinxia, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy, said there was now more plastic packaging, sanitation products and even furniture in the thrown-away waste.

Wang said the limited amount of household waste, most of it biodegradable, could be absorbed by nature's self-cleaning capacity in the past, but now the amount and variety of trash had far exceeded that capacity, threatening the environment.

"It [dumping refuse in rivers] is a rather prevalent phenomenon … in some extreme cases, the rivers are even clogged," Wang said.