The following text is for question 19 to 23

    Forty miles east of Jakarta, Indonesia, Citarum River runs over186 miles from Wayang Mountain to the Java Sea. The island’s largest river supports more than 30 million residents who rely on the water source for agricultural, domestic, and personal use.

    However, unregulated factory growth since the area’s rapid industrialization in the 1980s has choked the Citarum with both human and industrial waste. The river, now known as one of the most polluted in the world, is unrecognizable as part of the Parahyangan region, over 200 textile factories line the river banks. The dyes and chemicals used in the industrial process (lead, arsenic, and mercury amongst them )are churned into the water, changing its colour and lending the area an acrid dour. Plastic, Packaging and other detritus floats in the scummy water, rendering the river’s surface invisible beneath its carpet of junk.

    The effect on the local ecosystem has been devastating, fish float dead on the surface of the water, and local fisherman have turned to entrepreneurial methods of survival, picking up plastic from the water for recycling.

Why Citarum River is known as one of the most polluted in the world?