Workers sort waste at a waste treatment factory

Speaking at a meeting held bythe department on January 3 toreview its performance last year and make plans for this year, director Nguyen Toan Thang said the city’s focus with regard to urban solid waste management is onrecycling and burning technologies.

Thus, instead of threecategories, organic, recyclable and other wastes, rubbish just needed to beclassified into two, recyclable and others, he said.

The department has submittedthe proposal to the People’s Committee for approval and expects to introducethe change in the first quarter of this year.

The city has closed fivelandfill sites to reduce burial of solid wastes.

It has also made urbandevelopment plans at two of them, Go Cat in Binh Tan districtand Dong Thanh in Hoc Mon district.

Around 15 developers have expressed interest in building parks orhousing at the two sites, Thang said.

The city is also taking stepsto reduce the volume of buried waste and adopt advanced waste-treatmenttechnologies.

Late last year, construction work began on two waste-to-energy plants in Cu Chi district with a daily processing capacity of2,000 tonnes, and an industrial and hazardous waste-treatment plant in Binh Chanh district with a capacity of 500 tonnes.

Work on another solidwaste-treatment plant will start this month.

The Da Phuoc landfill site in Binh Chanh district, which receives more than 5,000tonnes of rubbish a day now,will become full and is expected to be closed by 2024.

Last year a total of nearly2.88 million tonnes of solid waste were treated. The city generates 9,500tonnes of waste daily, including 23 tonnes of medical waste and 350-400 tonnesof hazardous waste.

The city collected environmental protection fees from 3,505 production establishments last year.The fees exceed 12.5 billion VND (540,000 USD) per quarter.

There were more than 1,860 private garbage collectors, who were either members of environmental cooperative groups or had their own business.

The department organised a number of activities to spread the message to the public that trash should not be discarded indiscriminately.

It also installed more than 33,600 dustbins in public places./. VNA

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