No balm yet for province’s headache over 100,000 tons of piled up garbage

Tra Vinh had pleaded with it last month to take 30,000 tons for treatment.

"Garbage treatment plants in Can Tho City already have too much and cannot receive more," Dao Anh Dung, the city’s vice chairman, said on Monday.

The Mekong Delta province is stuck with around 100,000 tons of garbage accumulated over the years, and said it is struggling with pollution at a landfill in Tra Vinh Town, its capital.

Ho Chi Minh City-based Vietnam Energy Environment Industrial Technology Company Limited (Vina Encorp) had won a contract to incinerate 120,000 tons of garbage at the landfill in 2017.

The place was shut down after being overloaded, which caused pollution, affecting people living nearby.

Vina Encorp is contracted to complete the work in June 2021, but there have been delays due to "certain difficulties," leaving around 100,000 tons of waste piled up.

To remove the landfill from the list of facilities causing serious pollution by the end of this year, provincial authorities gave permission to Vina Encorp to send 30,000 tons from there to the waste-to-energy plant run by Can Tho Everbright Environmental Protection Holdings Ltd (EB Can Tho) in Can Tho.

A spokesperson for EB Can Tho said it could handle the trash but city authorities have not agreed.

In its latest statement, Can Tho said landfills in the city collect 650 tons of domestic solid waste each day and that represents only 80-90 percent of the total amount discharged.

Can Tho itself has waste piled up in O Mon and Co Do districts, it said.

A Tra Vinh official said for now the province is working with another company to see if it could handle the 30,000 tons using new technology.

In Vietnam, domestic waste is not sorted and people put all types of garbage into common trash bins that end up in some landfills, even in big cities.

The nation produces some 25.5 million tons of waste a year with 75 percent of it being buried.