Estimates of early-industrial inputs of nutrients to river systems: implication for coastal eutrophication

Although coastal eutrophication is generally recognised as a recent phenomenon related to the well-documented increase in riverine nutrient delivery during the last 30 or 40 years, a few historical records paradoxically show that, in some places like the Southern Bight of the North Sea, or the Northern Adriatic, algal proliferation as intense as presently observed was already regularly occurring at the end of the 19th century. Estimated riverine nutrient loads from diffuse sources or from domestic point sources of waste water at that time are too low to account for these observations. We attempted a retrospective evaluation of the possible contribution of industrial activity to nutrient river loading. The figures indicate that, by the end of the last century, large scale use of traditional processes in textile and paper industries, in tanneries, candles factories and others was responsible for a dominant part of the nutrient load carried by rivers in Western Europe and could have caused nutrient inputs to coastal zones similar to the present ones.