Rivers of Ruin: The Deadly Beat of Wastewater

In Zambia, a Chinese company allowed fifty million liters of waste containing heavy metals into a stream that connected to the Kafue River, the country's most important waterway, putting the lives of sixty percent of Zambians in danger, since they get their drinking water from the river.

In China, industrial concerns and private people dumped 74 million metric tonnes of solid waste, including industrial solid waste, construction debris, and others in the Yangtze River, Asia's largest waterways, putting the existence of almost 0.6 billion people in jeopardy, since they make use of the water for a number of things.

In Egypt, humans dump around 150 million tonnes of industrial waste into the nearby basin of River Nile, Africa's largest river, complicating the lives of at least 90 million people in that country, since they make use of the river on a daily basis.

These cases are not exceptions, since globally an estimated two million tonnes of sewage, industrial, and agricultural waste are released into water bodies daily, with 80 percent of wastewater flowing into the ecosystem untreated, putting the lives of billions of people at risk.

Presently, the globe produces 380 trillion liters of wastewater every year, with only 56 percent of the wastewater generated treated before disposal into rivers in 2020, with wastewater production projected to increase by 24 percent by 2030 and 51 percent by 2050.

Globally, humans produced 413.8 million metric tonnes of plastic in 2023, with 360.2 million metric tonnes of the product discharged into rivers, a figure that grew by more than seven-fold in the past four decades, and slated to double by 2040.

On a worldwide basis, home and industrial concerns produce around 1.3 to 2.1 billion tonnes of agricultural wastes yearly, with around 50 percent discarded into places like rivers without any form of treatment, solid waste production reaching 2.59 billion tonnes by 2030.

With the colossal amount of waste, plastics, and agricultural wastes produced each year, it is not surprising that they find their ways to rivers, especially as little thought goes into how they are to be discarded.

Only 11 percent of the world's treated water gets reused, and about fifty percent of the world's untreated wastewater enters rivers, lakes, and seas, meaning a lot of wastewater, treated or untreated, find their way into rivers, with 27 teragrams of methane emitted globally from rivers and streams, about a quarter of the methane produced by fossil fuel.

Unfortunately, wastewater treatment facilities treat sludge with anaerobic digesters, which emit more than three times the methane than plants without digesters, with the US treatment for example emitting 10.9million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide every year, twice the IPCC (2019) Tier 2 estimates.

Methane emissions from cities around the world indicate rising levels in relation with the amount of untreated wastewater per person, with urban areas accounting for up to 22 percent of global methane emissions.

This has an effect on climate change, since methane is a strong greenhouse gas, with a global warming capacity 80 times greater than carbon dioxide over 20 years.

Reducing wastewater in rivers is crucial for maintaining water quality, and it can be achieved through improved wastewater treatment plants, decentralized wastewater systems, and educating the public about the importance of proper wastewater disposal and the impacts of wastewater on rivers.

What to Eat

Vegan food from Zambia, Credit, Emilia Leese