Hanoi to Have More Recycled Energies

The urbanisation process is speeding up in major provinces and cities in Vietnam, particularly the capital city of Hanoi where environmental issues have caught more concerns after its administrative area was expanded. The Hanoi Department of Natural Resources and Environment warned that dumping sites in Hanoi will be full by 2012 and fail to treat wastes given the current waste growth rate of 15 percent a year. Thus, the city is rapidly deploying the National Strategy on Solid Waste Management in Vietnam from now till 2025, with vision to 2050.

 

Minimising the amount of new household waste - one of the most important and effective measures to waste management, has not received enough attention from the local government. According to a survey conducted by the Hanoi Urban Environment Company (URENCO), the amount of household waste rises by 15 percent annually. Reusing and recycling wastes is deployed in an informal manner, in a small scale, in a spontaneous way and with inconsistent method. This work lacks orientation and is controlled by the private sector. Landfill is the major technology for treating solid wastes. Up to 82 out of 98 open landfills in the country are unhygienic. Incinerators are mainly used for hospitals and other medical units but the current capacity is enough for treating a half of hazardous medical wastes. Environmental restoration in landfills is very limited. Dumping wastes in wrong places is still rampant, causing harmful impacts on human health and environmental pollution. According to environmentalists, without an effective waste management strategy, Hanoi will have no places for wastes in the next 10-20 years.

 

Hanoi is deploying a 3R (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) waste treatment project funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). This US$3 million project will help reduce 30 percent of waste disposed to landfills. According to the project management board, after three years of implementation, the facility has collected approximately 25,000 tonnes of organic waste to produce nearly 10,000 tonnes of compost. According to the JICA, if Hanoi applies innovative waste collecting and treating methods like the 3R initiative, it will save VND4 billion from waste disposal each month.

To deal with these threats, many solutions have been taken. For instance, URENCO, which is responsible for handling rubbish in Hanoi City, has applied modern technologies to waste treatment. According to the Government's direction, by 2025, Vietnam will minimise the volume of landfill waste to spare land funds and create waste-to-energy sources. Apart from underway centralised waste treatment zones like Nam Son and Xuan Son, URENCO is applying recycling technologies to turn waste into energy, construction materials and fertilisers. The waste-to-power incinerator project costing US$21 million is one of new technologies aiming to create more electricity for the city. This is a cooperative project with Japan.

 

Mr Nguyen Van Hoa, General Director of URENCO, said, in many big cities in Asia (Singapore, Tokyo, Taipei, Seoul and Kuala Lumpur, etc.), waste-to-energy technology is being applied in a wider scale while landfill method tends to decline. The technology used in the city will be synchronously implemented from sorting at source, treating organic wastes, and burning wastes to recover energy. In couple with applying processing technology, encouraging and creating an appropriate mechanism for recycling technology development will be a good opportunity for the city to reduce landfill areas, diminishing pressures on environmental pollution caused by tips where will receive only inert substances. Moreover, after being covered, remaining wastes are safe and disease-free.

 

The waste-to-power incinerator is expected to be operational by 2014. This is a sound and safe approach.