‘Waiting to die’: The dirty business of recycling in Vietnam

HANOI – Crouched between mountains of discarded plastic, Lanh strips the labels off bottles of Coke, Evian and local Vietnamese tea drinks so they can be melted into tiny pellets for reuse.

More waste arrives daily, piling up like technicolour snowdrifts along the roads and rivers of Xa Cau, one of hundreds of “craft” recycling villages encircling Vietnam’s capital Hanoi where waste is sorted, shredded and melted.

The villages present a paradox: They enable reuse of some of the 1.8 million tonnes of plastic waste Vietnam produces each year, and allow employees to earn much-needed wages.

But the recycling is done with few regulations, pollutes the environment and threatens the health of those involved, both workers and experts told AFP.

“This job is extremely dirty. The environmental pollution is really severe,” said 64-year-old Lanh, who asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of losing her job.

It is a conundrum facing many fast-growing economies, where plastic use and disposal has outpaced the government’s ability to collect, sort and recycle.

Even in wealthy countries, recycling rates are often abysmal because plastic products can be expensive to repurpose and sorting rates are low.

But the rudimentary methods used in Vietnam’s craft villages produce dangerous emissions and expose workers to toxic chemicals, experts say.

“Air pollution control is zero in such facilities,” said Mr Hoang Thanh Vinh, an analyst at the United Nations Development Programme focused on waste recycling.

Untreated wastewater is often dumped directly into waterways, he added.

The true scale of the problem is hard to judge, with few comprehensive studies.

In Minh Khai village, Mr Vinh said, a sediment analysis found “very high contamination of lead and the presence of dioxins”, as well as furan – all of which have been linked to cancer.

And in 2008, the life expectancy for residents of the villages was found to be a full decade shorter than the national average, according to the Environment Ministry.

The local authorities and the ministry did not reply to AFP’s requests for comment.

Lanh believes the toxic waste in Xa Cau gave her husband blood cancer, but she still spends her days sorting rubbish to pay his medical bills.

“This village is full of cancer cases, people just waiting to die,” she said.

Sickness and wealth

No data exists on cancer rates in the villages, but AFP spoke to more than half a dozen workers in Xa Cau and Minh Khai who reported colleagues or family members with cancer.

Vietnam Zero Waste Alliance coordinator Xuan Quach said sustained exposure to the “toxic environment” made it inevitable that residents face “health risks that are of course higher”.

A 60-year-old villager known as Dat has been sorting plastic in Xa Cau for a decade and said the job “definitely affects your health”.

“There’s no shortage of cancer cases in this village.”

But there is also no shortage of workers, keen for the economic lifeline recycling provides.

In Xa Cau, plastic piles up around multi-storey homes, some with ornate facades noting the years they were built.

“We get richer, thanks to this business,” said 58-year-old Nguyen Thi Tuyen, who lives in a two-storey home.

“Now all the houses are brick houses... In the past, we were just a farming village.”

Most of the waste the villagers recycle is home-grown, researchers and residents say.

But even though Vietnam recycles only about a third of its own plastic waste, it also imports thousand of tonnes annually from Europe, the US and Asia.

Imports soared after China stopped accepting plastic waste in 2018, though recently Vietnam has tightened regulations and announced plans to phase out imports too.

For now, US and European Union trade statistics show shipments to Vietnam from the two economies reached over 200,000 tonnes in 2024.

In Minh Khai, the owner of a plant producing plastic pellets said domestic supply “is not enough”.

“I have to import from overseas,” 23-year-old Dinh, who gave only one name, explained over the whir of heavy machinery.

Most domestic waste does not get sorted, so it cannot easily be reused.

There have been efforts to improve the industry, including a ban on burning unrecyclable waste and building modern facilities.

But burning continues and unusable waste is often dumped in empty lots, according to Mr Vinh.

He said the government should help recyclers move to industrial parks with better environmental safeguards, formalising a sector that handles a quarter of the country’s recycling.

“The current way of recycling in recycling villages... is not good to the environment at all.” AFP