Three billion liters of untreated waste every single day

Daniel Pepper
A young girl pushes her raft along New Delhi's polluted Yamuna river.
She and a handful of others trawl the river for loose change tossed in
for good luck.

into one river from one city...

Fully three billion liters of waste are pumped into Delhi's Yamuna River each day.

[...]

80 percent of urban waste in India ends up in the country's rivers, and unchecked urban growth across the country combined with poor government oversight means the problem is only getting worse.

[...]

Much of the river pollution problem in India comes from untreated sewage. Samples taken recently from the Ganges River near Varanasi show that levels of fecal coliform, a dangerous bacterium that comes from untreated sewage, were some 3,000 percent higher than what is considered safe for bathing.

another unbelievably polluted river, the riachuelo, runs along the southeastern edge of buenos aires... i've walked along its banks, holding my nose the whole time...

The [Riachuelo] receives a significant quantity of industrial waste from the numerous factories along it, especially the leather processing facilities, which makes the Riachuelo one of the three most polluted rivers in the world. Among the most dangerous contaminants are heavy metals and sewers' water from all the saturated layers of the basin.

Junked ships line the banks of the Riachuelo in Buenos Aires

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