In many cities, the Urban Environment Company (URENCO) – contracted out by the local People’s Committee - collects, transports and disposes of domestic waste and in most cases, industrial and healthcare wastes as well. Waste collection rates were low even though they have been improving; there is still a great deal of disparity from one city to the next. The method of self disposing of waste into nearby rivers, lakes and at sites near home, or burning, or burying the trash is widespread. In contrast to the urban collection rates, rates in the rural areas were dismally low. In high-income rural areas, the amount of trash collected was a mere 20%, indicating that collection services for low-income rural population were practically non-existent. Waste collection fees also differ based on the type of dwelling. Residential customers pay according to the size of their family; hotels pay based on the number of their rooms; and market customers pay on the basis of the number of kiosks. Waste collection fees are 500 Vietnamese ??ng (VND) per capita/month for residential customers while businesses pay 2,000-30,000 or VND. While these fees are sufficient for covering the bulk of operational costs and collectors’ salaries, cities like Hanoi, HCMC and Danang, contend that the fees do not allow them full cost recovery. In recent years, they have reported an average annual deficit of 200 million dong, the equivalent of 13,000 USD (Watson 2004). If fees only cover operating costs at best, this means that the URENCOs can not afford capital expenditures or investments; indeed, they rely on the People’s Committee to fund such investments, money which is allocated by the central government. In recent years, much of the money for equipment and infrastructure improvement has come from official development assistance of developed nations.
The method of waste collection varies from one place to the next. In the urban districts, citizens place their waste out on the open gutters of the street in front of their dwelling for URENCO employees to pick up, a process that occurs a few times daily. The trash is transported by handcarts that the URENCO collectors push on foot door-to-door. When the handcarts, which have a capacity of 0.4 m3, are full, they are pushed to a designated transfer station not far away where a waste truck will take the waste to the nearest dumpsite or landfill. In places where there are no transfer points, residents are provided with a communal container and are responsible for disposing their waste into the containers. A URENCO truck comes by daily to unload the communal container and transport it to the dumpsite. Suburban districts have a similar process. In general, solid waste is not sorted at the source or at the transfer points. More notably, regardless of the type of waste being collected – whether domestic, industrial, healthcare, hazardous or non-hazardous – it is all disposed of in the same landfill.
FROM:
“Solid Waste Management in Vietnam: An Industrial Ecology Study”
by Thao Nguyen, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
http://www.seas.columbia.edu/earth/wtert/sofos/Nguyen_Vietnam_Waste_mana...