Young green cleaners in Saigon are our new heroes without cape

 Take a look at our Vietnamese heroes without cape.

While in Ho Chi Minh City there is no official recycling system, the city produces about 9,500 tonnes of domestic rubbish every day and there is little in the way of formal recycling.

“Despite being the commercial capital of the country, there is no official urban waste recycling system in Ho Chi Minh City,” Bijeesh Kozhikkodan Veettil, an expert in remote sensing, GIS and environmental research at the city’s Van Lang University, told Al Jazeera. “Instead, the local government depends on small companies for waste management in the city.”

“[There are] a lot of hawkers, street food vendors, and they use a lot of these one-time-use products, like plastic bags [and] utensils,” he said. “There are not a lot of garbage bins around the city, so that’s why there’s a habit of people just throwing it as is convenient for them.”

As usual, extra solutions to add even more value to our waste leaders:

- Changing habits is key: article mentions "People also simply assume that the government will clean up their mess" and is a must to improve such.
- Public fines strictly enforced and made public: amounts will serve to purchase new cleaning material and contribute to more cleaning areas
- Social involvement: if we do not reduce the amount of people littering the efforts of collectors & cleaners is nearly in vain. Over-flip is important.
- Government to consider the private sector capability to apply circular economy and recycling practices, not like now in a monopoly state-owned in-efficient way.
- Pilot cases applied in HCMC may be useful at lower scale in most of provinces along Vietnam suffering same landfills & untreated waste issue.

Glad to be part of your team supporting such key activities, you are the leaders.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/17/meaningful-work-volunteers-clean-ho-chi-minh-citys-fetid-canals-by-hand