Waste treatment in Vietnam encounters shortage of land, advanced technologies
Thursday, January 25, 2018, 22:02 GMT+7
The treatment of solid waste in two of the most important cities in Vietnam currently faces a scarcity of land needed for waste dumping and slowness in constructing treatment plants that employ modern technologies.
Many waste disposal areas in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, are in dire need of expansion due to the shortage of dumping space caused by the use of landfill as the primary treatment method.
The city’s largest treatment site, in Soc Son District, which receives about four thousand tons of solid waste daily, is expected to witness a two-fold increase in size, from its present 210 acres, equal to the area of just over 100 standard soccer fields combined, according to Le Van Duc, director of the Hanoi Department of Construction.
Other sizable landfills in the capital are expected to be one or two times larger by 2020, he said.
He added that confronting the lack of this type of resource, the local government has planned to establish waste treatment facilities with advanced technologies.
However, the project’s implementation has been slow so far. The construction of a plant providing such equipment in Soc Son District, Hanoi, has recently started, and is due for completion in 2019.
The capital has roughly 20 projects of solid waste management factories, 14 of which have obtained investment, said Nguyen Manh Quyen, director of the Hanoi Planning and Investment Department.
Ten more landfills will come into reality here, but only six of them are already in the process of taking physical shape, according to him.
In Ho Chi Minh City, the authorities aim to reduce the volume of buried waste by 50 percent no later than 2020, by converting it into electricity.
Four to five investors were interested in the waste-to-energy plants, Nguyen Thanh Phong, chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee, said last year.
The necessary standards and procedures of the bidding for such plants were required to be finished within the first quarter of this year.
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