Pollution is so severe in some stretches of the 6,300-kilometre river that new legislation is urgently needed to turn around the situation, the Yangtze River Water Resources Commission said in its report.
"Protecting water quality in the Yangtze river is now imperative," Xinhua news agency quoted the report as saying.
The report, which has yet to be published, said the amount of industrial waste pumped into the Yangtze annually stood at 30 billion tonnes in 2005, up from 15 billion tonnes a year in the 1980s.
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