Huaihe River, China's third longest, is seriously polluted due to excessive discharges of industrial and daily waste, according to a report from the Huaihe River Committee.

An excessive influx of industrial waste from the provinces along the river is the major source of contamination, said Wang Bin, deputy director of the committee under the Ministry of Water Resources, quoting a report examining the chemical oxygen demand (COD) and other chemical contents in the river in 2006.

The amount of COD, ammonia and nitrogen, the main indexes to determine the water quality, in the river has far exceeded the national standard, the report said.

Henan Province, the largest source of pollution, discharged a total of 327,400 tons of industrial waste into the river in 2006.

Only 43.2 percent of the 46 sections of the river's 44 major tributaries passed the quality test.

An average 4.4 billion tons of waste is discharged into the Huaihe every year, with the average COD density reaching 194 mg per liter.

The report admitted that the quality control project which was launched in 1993 had failed as 851,800 tons of COD flowed into the river in 2006, 35 percent more than the level stipulates.

Curbing industrial waste discharge is the prime task to realizing the target amount of 466,000 tons of COD with a concentration of 110 mg by 2010, the report said.

The report has been presented to the environmental inspection team under the National People's Congress, China's top legislature.

The Huaihe River originates at Mount Taibai, central China's Henan Province, and runs eastward between the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, cutting through Henan and east China's Anhui and Jiangsu provinces before entering the Yangtze River via the Hongze Lake.

(Xinhua News Agency July 28, 2007)