Scholar Claims Iran Dumping 10 Million People's Sewage into the Caspian Sea Per Day

Iran is dumping tens of millions of liters of untreated human waste into the Caspian Sea every day, an environmental expert in Mazandaran province has said.

In an interview with Rokna News Agency, Ghazir Abbasi, a faculty member at Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, said: “Every day, as much as ten million people's raw sewage enters the sea directly or indirectly, through Iran."

The three northern Iranian provinces that border the Caspian Sea have a combined total population of around eight million, but also experience some of the country’s heaviest tourist traffic at intervals throughout the year. Many cities and villages in the north of the country lack a modernized waste treatment system.

The Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water, is facing numerous threats despite its strategic importance to the five litoral states. All are the result of human activity, and include reductions to the water supply, illegal fishing, pollution from agriculture and industry, and the inflow of leachate from waste facilities.