Waste recycling needs rethink

The city badly needs supportive policies to develop the 3Rs (reduce, recycle and re-use of waste) industry to deal with the increasing amount of waste generated, municipal officials say.Le Van Khoa, director of the Ho Chi Minh City Recycle Fund, says a lot of waste can be reprocessed to generate composite fertiliser as well as “green” electricity.Many countries in the world recycle and reuse up to 90 percent of the waste, and only a minimal amount is buried in landfills. However, the situation is reversed in Vietnam, with only 10 percent of waste recycled and reused.This is not only a waste of resources, but also a burden to the economy, Khoa said.Nguyen Van Phuoc, deputy director of the HCM City Department of Natural Resources and Environment, said that the city alone discharged from 5,500 to 6,000 tonnes of waste per day and most of it is buried in waste dump.He said that the city has had to close the Dong Thanh, Phuoc Hiep and Go Cat landfills because they have been overloaded and it has become increasingly difficult to find new areas to dump waste.The department said very few enterprises operate in the 3R industry. The city has invited invest in waste recycling, but the lack of specific incentive policies makes it difficult to capture the interest of enterprises.In order to deal with the increasingly amount of waste, the city has piloted waste classification in households in six districts and invested in technology to generate ‘green’ electricity. However, the projects have not been effective because policy support has been missing, said Phuoc.He said that the city should come up with a comprehensive policy and strategy covering waste generation, collection and classification that provides financial incentives to enterprises and encourages the public to use ‘green’ products.Nguyen Van Tai, deputy director of the Institute of Strategy and Policy on Natural Resources and Environment at the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, said that in 2007, the country discharged 17 million tonnes of solid waste, including 250,000 tonnes of hazardous waste, 13 million tonnes of domestic solid waste, 2.8 million tonnes of industrial solid waste and about 770,000 tonnes of waste from guild villages.Tai predicts that the amount of waste could increase to 25 million tonnes in 2010. If the country does not pay attention to developing the 3R industry, the problem will get worse because there will be no land to bury huge amounts of waste in the near future.