Asia faces huge environmental costs due to lack of investment in sanitation, ADB says

MANILA (AP) - Asia is faced with a huge bill to clean up its polluted rivers and groundwater because it has not invested enough in infrastructure for disposing pollutants, the Asian Development Bank said Tuesday.

In Shanghai, for example, Chinese authorities had to spend S$1 billion to clean the Suzhou Creek, which runs through the metropolis and used to be a health risk to residents.

Chinese officials acknowledged the cleanup costs were many times higher than the cost of preventing the pollution, the bank said.

"Failure to act on sanitation and wastewater eventually comes home to roost when the problem results in a smelly, foul, turgid river that despoils a city and surrounding areas," said Amy Leung, the ADB's urban development specialist.

"But the real horror is the outbreak of typhoid and cholera caused by inadequate sanitation," she said in a statement.

About 2 billion Asians -- roughly 66 percent of the region's total population -- lack access to adequate sanitation, such as toilets, pit latrines, septic tanks, and sewage systems, the bank said. They account for nearly three-quarters of people worldwide without such facilities.