Hundreds of industrial parks have sprung up around the country but most of them lack facilities for environmental protection and workers’ housing.
Thoi Nay (Today) newspaper quoted analysts as saying many of the IPs had been built without proper planning. Many were merely land plots with some factories on them that were converted into IPs without any assessment of potential, environmental impacts, and workers’ needs.
A recent report by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment says average land use in IPs is only 46 per cent out of the total 57,300ha available in the country’s 249 IPs.
Many have not completed their infrastructure despite being operational for a long time. These include even major ones like Thang Long in Ha Noi, Pho Noi in Hung Yen, Tan Phu Trung in HCM City, and Song Than in Binh Duong.
The lack of systematic planning has also caused severe environmental problems. Around 70 per cent of the one million cubic metres of liquid waste generated by IPs are not treated before being released into the environment.
The Ministry of Industry and Trade’s Chemical Institute has also reported that the IPs also released 2 million tonnes of solid waste, including 50,000 tonnes that are hazardous. Ha Noi and HCM City are leading in proportion of hazardous waste.
The institute expects the volume to rise when the number of chemical and electronics factories increases.
It found that emissions from IPs like Quan Toan in Hai Phong and Phu My I and My Xuyen A in Ba Ria - Vung Tau have severely affected the health of workers as well as nearby residents.
Another major problem is that many IPs have not built housing for workers while others have housing but ignore their recreational needs, lacking sport, culture, and fitness facilities.
Luu Duc Hai, director of the Ministry of Construction’s Urban Development Department, said the failure to adopt the industrial-urban area concept which would facilitate housing development led to the critical shortage of housing and infrastructure at IPs.
To be designated as an urban zone, a place needs to have a population of 4,000 with 65 per cent of them involved in non-agricultural activities.
But though the areas around existing IPs have an average of 5,400 people, with all of them working in factories, none of the IPs had been considered as urban zones because authorities were unaware of this provision, he added.
