Senior Vietnamese officials have admitted serious shortcomings in the policies that regulate pollution from industrial wastewater against a backdrop of increasing protests from local communities. On separate occasions, officials said that the government needed to replace current policies and that the private sector needed incentives to improve wastewater management. The latest community protest was against a Vietnam-France steel mill in the Dien Ban district, which had ignored requests to temporarily cease operations to fix problems of pollution and excessive noise.
Only two thirds of Vietnam’s industrial zones have any concentrated wastewater treatment plants. The 118 plants located in industrial areas have been primarily funded by foreign sources, with few local enterprises or private investors investing in wastewater treatment.
According to Vietnam’s new ‘green growth’ strategy - approved by the Prime Minister last week - 80 per cent of the nation’s manufacturing industries must meet environmental standards by 2020, and half of its manufacturing sites will have adopted clean technologies for production. The government also aims to significantly increase investment in environmental technologies to reduce environmental degradation and create a low-carbon economy.
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