Toxic waste flows through Binh Yen

15/09/2015

  A canal in Binh Yen village is seriously polluted due to untreated waste discharged from the trading village        Tonnes of untreated waste in Nam Thanh Commune's Binh Yen village have been discharged into fields and canals, polluting the environment and causing headaches for authorities in northern Nam Dinh Province.      Over the past five years, the process of recycling aluminum, mainly from beer cans to manufacture pots and pans, generated toxic fumes, solid hazardous waste and wastewater in the commune, said Nguyen Van Dong, vice chairman of the People's Committee of the commune.      It was estimated that about 1 tonne of untreated waste and 500 cubic metres of wastewater were discharged daily into the village. Of note, some 269 of 570 households in the village were reported to be participating in recycling aluminum, he said.      Recent findings from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment indicate that the contents found in the surface water of Nam Ninh Hai River were 12.2 times higher in pollutants than permitted. Further, COD was 20 times higher, and BOD5 was 21.2 times higher than normal.      A 53-year-old villager said her family began recycling aluminum years ago since the monthly income from recycling aluminum was double or triple what they received growing rice.      "We knew that doing this caused environmental pollution. At first, we also felt suffocated by the fumes but we have no choice," she said.      Nguyen Thi Men, another villager, said that within three years she, her husband and their three sons re-paid VND 400 million to the local bank for a loan to purchase equipment to recycle aluminum.      She said that she and other villagers expect support from the Government to relocate them to an industrial zone with proper waste treatment systems in the coming years.      Nguyen Van Ngoan, chairman of the communal People's Committee, said aluminum recycling created jobs for nearly 2,000 villagers. This was the reason why it was difficult for the local authorities to force villagers to stop recycling, he said.      Now, however, the bottom of local canals, which are filled with toxic waste and wastewater, are higher than the surface of local fields, he said. Pollution in the canals, which were used for irrigation, meant local farmers could not grow rice in about 4 hectares of agricultural land in the commune, he said.      According to Ngoan, a one-year project, worth around VND 450 million funded by Swedish International Development Co-operation and several international organizations, was launched in 2008 to reduce pollution in the commune. The project helped the producers to build chimneys, provided them barrels to collect hazardous solid wastes, and helped them partially treat wastewater, he said.      "But when the project ended in 2009, everything returned to where it was," Ngoan said.      According to Ngoan, another one-year project to build models to treat fumes, hazardous solid waste and wastewater in the trade village, launched in 2011 with support from the Viet Nam Environment Administration, was still just a model after the project finished because villagers could not pay for the operating costs.      "The name of the trade village is Binh Yen, it means ‘peaceful', but we felt it is not peaceful at all, since environmental pollution from recycling aluminum here caused concerns for us year by year," Director of Nam Dinh Province's Natural Resources and Environment Department Vu Minh Luong said. "We cooperated with the communal People's Committee to issue fines for the recyclers but failed, as they were ignored. We planned to relocate the trade village to an industrial zone."   VNS