The failure by enterprises to use appropriate wastewater-treatment technologies is the prime reason for the increasing environmental pollution, the HCM City Institute of Tropical Technologies and Environmental Protection says.
Phung Chi Sy, the Institute’s deputy director, explains that treating effluents in different industries requires different technologies.
Many firms fail to use the right ones and pump below-standard effluents into the common treatment system which is not designed to treat them, he says.
The common treatment systems at industrial zones can only treat certain pollutants with certain pH content, biochemical oxygen demand pollution, or chemical oxygen demand pollution, he says.
Toxic substances like lubricants and heavy metals should be treated to the required standard by companies before being let into the common systems, he says.
The institute says the Ministry of Science and Technology needs to develop standards for the quality of environmental technologies and help enterprises choose suitable ones besides providing official agencies the required tools to examine and evaluate technologies.
The country has more than 700 cities and towns but less than 5 per cent of them have appropriate wastewater treatment facilities, it says.
Only a third of the country’s 200 industrial zones have a common wastewater treatment system and a mere 15 per cent of the factories in these zones have treatment systems, it adds.
In addition, trade villages, animal farms, hospitals, and schools all release untreated wastewater into the environment.
Sy says, however, that environmental technologies, especially waste-treatment technologies, have been developing because of local research and technology transfer from abroad.
In recent years the ministries of industry and trade and natural resources and environment have drafted strategies and policies to develop environmental expertise.