Growth and environmental protection go hand-in-hand in the vision of sustainable development. Vietnam is projected to be one of the world’s fastest growing economies, with projected growth rates around 7 percent over the next decade. Thanks to Vietnam’s strong past growth, around 20 million people have risen above the poverty line in less than a decade. However, the country’s rapid economic growth also presents an unprecedented environmental challenge, particularly for burgeoning urban and industrial areas, which already experience serious health and environmental impacts.
Solid waste is a growing problem for Vietnam. The country is producing more than 15 million tons of waste each year, and this volume is expected to grow rapidly over the next decade. Urban areas, which contain only 24 percent of the population of the country, produce more than 6 million tons— 50 percent—of the country’s municipal waste. By 2010, municipal waste generation is expected to increase by over 60 percent. In addition, expanding urbanization, combined with industrial growth and the modernization of healthcare services, will lead to a significant increase in hazardous and hazardous healthcare waste generation, posing serious health concerns if not properly managed.
The country has responded with a sound legal framework, an aggressive investment plan, and an emphasis on improving local services, especially in major cities. However, achieving the goal of safe and cost-effective management and disposal of waste will remain a major challenge, requiring concerted efforts by government, industries, hospitals, solid waste operators, and individuals.
Given Vietnam’s unprecedented economic growth, waste from households, industries, commercial enterprises, and hospitals is expected to increase rapidly over the next decade. Managing this waste is a monumental challenge—both because of its substantial cost and its large potential benefits to public health and the quality of life. It is also important for improving the lives of many poor Vietnamese, who are more susceptible to the health effects of improper waste management and rely on informal waste collection and recycling activities for their livelihood. Recognizing the economic and social costs of poor solid waste management, the Government of Vietnam is addressing these issues through a combination of policies, financing, and public awareness and participation.
Waste Generation
Vietnam produces over 15 million tons of waste each year from various sources. More than 80 percent (12.8 million tons/yr) is from municipal sources, including households, restaurants, markets, and businesses. Industries generate over 2.6 million tons of waste (17 percent) each year, making it the second most significant source. About 160,000 tons/yr (1 percent) of Vietnam’s waste is considered hazardous, including hazardous healthcare waste from hospitals; toxic or flammable waste from industrial processes; and, pesticides and pesticide containers from agriculture. If not managed well, the toxic, carcinogenic, hazardous healthcare, and other hazardous properties of this waste pose a significant threat to public health and the environment.
Waste is concentrated in urban areas. Urban areas contain only 24 percent of the population of the
country, but produce over 6 million tons (50 percent) of the country’s municipal waste. This is due to the more affluent lifestyles, larger quantity of commercial activities, and more intense industrialization found in urban areas. These activities also increase the proportion of hazardous waste (such as batteries and household solvents) and non-degradable waste (such as plastic, metal, and glass) found in urban waste. In contrast, people in rural areas produce municipal waste at less than half of the rate of those in urban areas (0.3 kg/person/day vs. 0.7 kg/person/day), and most of the waste (99 percent of cultivation waste and 65 percent of domestic waste vs. 50 percent for urban domestic waste) is easily degradable organic waste.
Industrial waste is concentrated in focus economic zones, industrial parks, and urban areas. About 80 percent of the 2.6 million tons of industrial waste generated each year is from the industrial centers in the North and South. Ho Chi Minh City and surrounding provinces generate nearly 50 percent of the country’s industrial waste; 30 percent is generated in the North Coast–Red River Delta region. Additionally, the nearly 1,500 craft villages—predominantly found in rural areas in the North—produce 774,000 tons/yr of non-hazardous waste.
Hazardous waste generation poses a growing threat. The largest sources of hazardous waste are industries (130,000 tons/yr) and hospitals (21,000 tons/yr of hazardous healthcare waste). Additionally, agricultural sources produce approximately 8,600 tons of pesticides and contaminated pesticide containers each year and past pesticide use has resulted in the accumulation of an estimated 37,000-ton stockpile of confiscated agricultural chemicals. Regional differences in hazardous waste generation are significant; in the case of industrial hazardous waste generation, the Southern Focus Economic Zone accounts for 75 percent of the industrial hazardous waste in the country. Some 27 percent of the country’s hazardous healthcare waste is located in HCMC, Hanoi, and Thanh Hoa, while most hazardous agricultural waste is found in the agricultural areas of the Mekong River Delta.
Dramatic increases in waste generation are expected. By 2010, Vietnam will have a projected 10 million more urban dwellers. Consumption will grow; manufacturing will grow, with more rapid growth in hazardous waste intensive industries; and health care will undergo continued modernization. These changes are estimated to result in a 60 percent increase in municipal waste generation; a 50 percent increase in industrial waste generation; and an over threefold increase in hazardous waste generation, mostly attributable to industrial sources. Considering the high cost of safe collection and disposal, initiatives to reduce waste—such as promoting public awareness and cleaner production, and introducing economic incentives based on the Polluters Pay Principle—could result in significant savings. For example, a 10 percent reduction in waste generation could result in an annual disposal savings of approximately VND 200 billion and VND 130 billion for municipal and hazardous healthcare waste, respectively.
Waste Handling
The handling of waste—including reuse and recycling, collection, treatment and disposal—is crucial to providing a cost-effective waste management system that is able to reduce public health and environmental risks. Most of the municipal waste in Vietnam is not safely disposed. However, there have been significant improvements by the public urban environmental companies (URENCOs) that are responsible for municipal waste collection and disposal. Proper handling of hazardous waste, which is the responsibility of the industries and hospitals that produce it, remains severely limited. Recycling and reuse in Vietnam is an active industry in Vietnam, driven by an informal network of waste pickers at landfills, informal waste collectors, and waste buyers.
Municipal Waste
Cities are collecting more municipal waste. Waste collection in cities is improving, but is limited in rural and poor areas. Urban areas collect an average of 71 percent of the waste, a number that has increased steadily since 2000. In general, larger cities in Vietnam collect a larger percentage of their waste (76 percent) than smaller cities (70 percent), while in rural areas collection rates are typically less than 20 percent. The poor are largely not served by collection services; nine out of ten of the poorest urban households do not receive solid waste collection service. New initiatives are being promoted to fill the gaps in municipal waste collection service. For example, community-based and private sector organizations are collecting waste in rural villages and in urban areas without municipal coverage.
Municipal waste disposal practices are improving but still represent a threat to health and environment. The dominant form of disposal of municipal waste remains open dumping; 49 sites have been identified on a national list as hotspots with high environmental and human health risks. Of the 91 disposal sites in the country, only 17 are sanitary landfills. In many areas, self-disposal methods—such as burning or burying waste, or dumping in rivers, canals, and open fields—is common. Poorly operated landfills and open dump sites cause environmental problems for the surrounding communities, including contamination of ground and surface water by untreated leachate, emissions of airborne pollutants, and the spread of odors, flies, mosquitoes, rodents, dust, and noise, leading to a high incidence rate of skin, digestive, and respiratory disease.
Hazardous Waste
Industrial hazardous waste treatment systems are largely inadequate. Given the lack of combined treatment facilities and limited incentives for safe disposal, many industries practice a variety of unsafe methods of treatment and disposal, including allowing URENCOs to collect and dispose the hazardous waste with municipal waste; storage onsite; sale to recyclers, or even indiscriminate dumping. For larger industries and industrial zones, some common practices are emerging, including using simple furnaces or industrial boilers in nearby industries or specialized waste treatment enterprises.
Hazardous healthcare waste treatment capacity is growing but hampered by poor operation. Recent investments have established enough incinerator capacity to treat 50 percent of Vietnam’s hazardous healthcare waste. However, a lack of financing for operation and maintenance of incinerators has often led to improper operation, which increases the risk of toxic dioxin and furan emissions or the disposal of healthcare waste as municipal waste. There is a need to develop a coherent and consistent approach to health care waste management.
Stockpiled agricultural chemicals are being treated. Roughly half of agricultural chemical wastes stockpiled in storage areas were treated in 2002 by using incineration and chemical techniques. However, the treatment is expensive and often conducted in an unsatisfactory manner, posing the risk of further environmental impacts, either as contaminated sludge and ash, or by air emissions, including heavy metals, dioxin, and furans.
Waste Re-use and Recycling
Recycling is common practice in Vietnam. Households routinely separate recyclable wastes such as metals and paper for sale to itinerant buyers, or sell it directly to local depots. Waste pickers are also separating reusable and recyclable wastes. This dynamic recycling market is largely led by the informal sector; in Hanoi, for example, the informal sector recycles 22 percent of all waste produced. In the industrial sector, several types of industries can recycle as much as 80 percent of their waste. Artisans and workers at many craft villages have been particularly successful in capitalizing on this opportunity, recycling over 90 percent of their potentially recyclable waste. Annual cost savings on disposal could be substantial. For example if each of 6 key industries could recycle 50 percent of its potentially recyclable wastes they would save VND 54 billion on disposal costs. Similarly, a 10 percent decrease in municipal waste could save VND 200 billion annually on disposal.
The market for recyclables has a large potential for expansion. Thirty-two percent of the municipal waste currently placed in disposal sites in urban areas in Vietnam, or 2.1 million tons per year, consists of commercially recyclable materials such as paper, plastic, metal, and glass. This additional recycling could result in a substantial reduction in disposal costs and allow the largely poor informal sector to capture an estimated VND 135 billion per year in additional recycling revenues in HCMC alone.
The composition of Vietnamese waste makes composting potentially attractive. The high proportion of organic matter in municipal waste provides potential for composting, which can reduce disposal costs while producing a marketable soil conditioner for uses such as agriculture and public. However, this practice is not widespread in Vietnam for many reasons, including inadequate separation of organic waste, poor product quality, and poor marketing. With the development of a strong market for composting fertilizers and successful source separation, the effectiveness of centralized composting facilities could increase considerably.
The poor involved in the informal recycling sector remain at risk. In terms of the ratio of waste pickers to total urban population, the size of the informal sector in Hanoi compares to that of Jakarta and Bangalore and is two times higher than in Manila. More than two-thirds of waste workers are women, who earn less than men working in the waste sector, and 9 percent of waste pickers are children. These groups tend to be socially marginalized. They frequently live on or near garbage disposal sites, and thus are exposed to environmental and safety hazards. A few efforts have been carried out to provide micro-credit to female waste pickers, and to reduce the number of children working at waste dumps. However, there is much to be done to support the informal waste sector.
Management Issues
While there are many barriers to effective implementation, Vietnam has put in place a sound legal framework for environmental protection and waste management. The institutional framework includes URENCOs as service providers for municipal waste management at the local level. Led by MoNRE, regulatory agencies at both central and local levels oversee and monitor the management of solid waste from industries, hospitals, and URENCOs. Several new strategies have resulted in a major increase in investment, especially in municipal waste. Nevertheless, several weaknesses remain.
Local institutions are limited by staff skills. While URENCOs allocate sufficient staff to undertake their duties, they suffer from a lack of equipment and capital, staff trained specifically for solid waste management, and an institutional mandate for cost-effective waste management. As they have focused much of their efforts on services for municipal waste management, URENCOs also have limited skills and equipment to provide potentially valuable hazardous waste collection and disposal services for hospitals and industries.
Regulations are not effectively enforced. Resources and institutional capability to implement Vietnam’s policy framework are lacking at the operational level, and regulations are not effectively enforced. The regulation of waste management operators, industries, and hospitals—by MoNRE and other line agencies and authorities, including MOH, MOI, and IZMB—suffers from major gaps in enforcement and insufficient supervision of waste management practices, largely due to limited human resources, unclear mandates, fragmented and overlapping roles of various government agencies, and limited interagency coordination. This has resulted in limited incentives for proper operation of landfills or investments by industries in waste treatment, and has allowed inexpensive, unsafe methods of disposal—such as open dumping—to proliferate.
Lack of financing for operations threatens the sustainability of investments. Investments have increased nearly sixfold, from VND 195 billion in 1998 to VND 1,083 billion in 2003, and are expected to continue. Between now and 2020, planned landfill development, closure of unsafe open dumps, and further investment in incinerators for hazardous healthcare waste are expected to cost between VND 30 trillion and 40 trillion. However, the sustainability of these investments is questionable under current conditions, since there is limited spending on operation and maintenance of solid waste collection and disposal systems (0.18 percent of GNP, or VND 160,000 per ton), and fees can only cover about 50 percent of the expenditures for operation and maintenance of solid waste collection and disposal. While large subsidies from central and local governments (VND 400 billion in 2003) are provided, the resources are not adequate, especially in the case of disposal, where overall poor operation and maintenance has resulted in unsafe disposal sites. In many cities, improved cost recovery can be achieved through more effective fee collection and service agreements with the city’s departments. In other cities, it may be necessary to increase fees, a measure that has met with resistance in many localities.
Civil society plays a limited role in waste management. Public communities and private groups currently play a limited role in solid waste management systems. To respond, the government has developed a number of policies and programs to promote public participation and carry out more public awareness programs, which has helped improve waste collection and other services such a street sweeping. Volunteer clean-up programs and public hygiene awareness campaigns have also started to gain momentum in Vietnam.
Source: Solid Waste, Vietnam Environment Monitor 2004