Some 15 million tons of waste is collected annually from urban and rural areas in Vietnam. Statistics from 2015 showed that 80% of daily waste is simply buried, local media quoted Tong Van Nga, chairman of the Vietnam Association for Building Materials (VABM), as saying at a conference on reducing the burial of trash and processing waste into fuels or ecofriendly products, held in Hanoi on August 22.

Participants discuss ways of processing waste into manufacturing materials in the cement industry 

The conference was co-organized by VABM and Loesche Group, a Germany-based equipment supplier of sizable projects in terms of cement, steel, electricity and coal. It saw the participation of cement processors and managing departments under the Ministry of Construction, along with the relevant agencies.

If Vietnam continues to resort to burying as its main waste-treatment method, the land funds of the major cities of Hanoi and HCMC for burying trash may fall short, said Nga. In addition, most landfills have had a negative impact on the environment as they contaminate the groundwater and release methane, adversely affecting climate change, according to Thomas Loesche, CEO of Loesche Group.

The Loesche representative said the conference will enable the firm to develop and provide services and products, with advanced technology to help the Vietnamese cement sector and others minimize their damaging effects on the environment by taking advantage of waste. The firm boasts more than 100 years of experience in manufacturing grinders for treating urban solid waste, with a capacity of 50 tons of waste per hour, which currently amounts to a maximum of 200 tons of waste per hour.

In addition, the firm owns grinders for treating waste mud mixed with solid waste. The grinders can mix 40% of the waste mud with solid waste to form a highly flammable organic substance that serves cement-processing plants.

Addressing the conference, Deputy Minister of Construction Bui Pham Khanh stressed that the Prime Minister had approved in May a national strategy on managing solid waste until 2025, with a vision toward 2050. According to the strategy, solid waste needs to be viewed as a resource, which can be collected, classified and encouraged to be converted into fuels or ecofriendly products.

Waste, when used as an alternative fuel to manufacture cement, will be beneficial to the environment, in addition to helping save natural resources, stated Khanh, adding that the cement industry needs a significant amount of energy for manufacturing. There are approximately 82 cement production lines nationwide, with a total designed capacity of 97 million tons per year. This number may surge in the coming period.

Tais Mazza, another representative of Loesche, said the people living in Europe are charged high fees for waste disposal services, and these fees are used to fund waste treatment. Therefore, creating a waste-treatment fund through dumping fees will attract many investors to join projects for processing waste into alternative fuels.

In converting waste into fuel and cutting down on the burial of waste, Vietnam aims to reduce the amount of buried waste to 10% by 2020.

SGT