Vietnam - No solution found, Hanoi still bears pollution

VietNamNet Bridge – Deputy Director of the Hanoi Department for Natural Resources and the Environment--Pham Van Khanh has admitted that the environment pollution has existed for many years, but still cannot be settled.

Khanh said that it is very difficult to find out an optimal solution to the problem.

According to the department, the total amount of solid waste in the capital city is about 5.371 tons per day, including 3200 tons of domestic waste a day from urban areas, and 2500 tons from rural areas.

Though all the 18 districts have signed contracts with environment companies to maintain the environmental sanitation, big problems still have not been settled in many localities.

There exist many hamlets and residential quarters in remote areas, where garbage has not been collected. Only five out of the 18 districts in the suburbs have waste collected and treated in a concentrated way. Meanwhile, in the other 13 districts, only a part of waste can be collected and treated.

It is estimated that less than 70 percent of waste have been collected and treated. The environmental pollution has got serious in the districts of Thach That, Quoc Oai, Chuong My and Phuc Tho.

Since the waste in rural areas has not been fully treated, garbage has been gathered in big heaps on the roads, which has caused serious environment pollution. A lot of big rubbish dumps can be found along the provincial highway No. 419 in Thach That district and along the Highway No. 6.

Especially, in many suburb communes, local residents have been using the lakes and ponds as the rubbish dumps. As these are spontaneous rubbish dumps, where technical treatment procedures are not followed, they have been threatening the water resources.

Everyone can see the problems in waste treatment now, but not everyone knows how to settle the problems. Most of the localities still do not have waste treatment areas, while the city’s waste treatment is limited and cannot handle the rubbish from the localities. While environment sanitation service companies cannot cooperate with each other well, the projects on treating waste on the spot with sanitary landfills have made no progress.

Khanh said that the collection and treatment of waste in rural areas has not been organized in a professional way, which has resulted in the higher percentage of untreated rubbish of 40 percent.

Meanwhile, the city’s authorities have just requested local authorities to “save yourselves” before a detailed programming is set up.

Recently, the Hanoi People’s Committee has propped up money to help localities to treat rubbish themselves, but very few localities have done the work, reasoning that they do not have money to have land fund for sanitary landfills. However, the localities have a common thought that they want to bring rubbish to other localities instead of treating the rubbish right on their land.

In fact, Hanoians do not applaud the plan to set up sanitation landfills, believing that the modern capital city needs to use advanced technologies in treating waste.

Explaining this, Khanh said that Hanoi strives to build some waste treatment plants using advanced technologies and reduce the landfill proportion to 50 percent of total rubbish. However, it would be not easy to implement the task. It takes 20-30 dollars to treat one ton of rubbish with modern technologies. Therefore, very few investors would be brave enough to make investment in the field which would take a long time to recover the investment capital.

Khanh said that even if using the technologies allowing to treat rubbish at 15 dollars per ton, this would be beyond the city’s capability.

Source: Dai doan ket

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