Untreated sewage from factory discharges and urban centres now accounts for 10 per cent of the Yellow River's flow, a prominent Chinese group says.
The volume of waste water flowing into the river, China's second longest, doubled from 2 billion tonnes to 4.3 billion between 1980 and 2005, Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based NGO, told the China Daily.
"It now accounts for about one-tenth of its total volume," Ma said.
The 5,464-km river supplies water to more than 150 million people and irrigates 15 per cent of the country's farmland, but has lost a third of its fish species and is 70 per cent unfit for drinking or swimming, state media have reported.
Fearing environmental degradation could slow China's booming economy, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has made sustainable development a key tenet of central government policy.
But growth in heavy industry continues apace along the river's middle reaches.
About 400 billion yuan ($A63 billion)) worth of coal and chemical-based projects were earmarked for construction along an 800-km stretch of the river between China's arid northern regions of Ningxia and Inner Mongolia, the paper said, citing Xinhua news agency.
Twenty million tonnes of industrial sewage were discharged into the river every year at Baiyin, a metallurgical industrial base in China's northwestern Gansu province, the paper said, quoting an investigative report by state-run China Central Television.
"Many of our children have no hair and bad teeth," the paper quoted Wang Mingzhi, a Baiyin resident, as saying.
"Heavy metals in the water are very harmful to people's health," Wang said.
Polluters had little incentive to curb effluents, Ma said.
"For companies that pollute, it is cheaper to break the law and pay the fine than it is to abide by the rules."
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