China pumps record sewage into longest river

BEIJING (Reuters) - China, where water shortages are compounded by pollution, pumped a record 30.5 billion metric tons of sewage and industrial waste into the Yangtze, its longest river, last year, state media said on Wednesday.

Decades of heavy industrialization have made water from some of China's lakes and rivers so polluted it is no longer usable, with untreated waste pumped directly into water sources.

The amount of sewage discharged into the river was an increase of 900 million metric tons or 3.1 percent over 2005, Hu Jiajun, a spokesman for the Yangtze River Water Resources Commission, was quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying.

Sewage discharged into the river had risen from 15 billion metric tons at the end of the 1980s and 24 billion metric tons in 2000, the agency said.

(Reporting by Nick Macfie; editing by Jerry Norton)