Top importer Vietnam struggles to recycle plastic waste, faces curbs

MINH KHAI, Vietnam – Countless discarded bags float on the canal running through Minh Khai village, whose narrow streets are clogged with tall heaps of plastic waste spilling out from villagers’ front yards and stacked near furnaces where non-recyclable scrap is burned.

This plastic recycling “craft village”, an hour’s drive from Vietnam’s capital Hanoi, is where some of the plastic sorted for recycling in Japan, America and Europe ends up for final treatment.

Delegates at a United Nations summit in South Korea this week are discussing new global rules that could limit that trade, which UN data shows was worth US$3.8 billion (S$5 billion) in 2023.

Stricter domestic requirements on waste imports will also be applicable in Vietnam from 2025.

Vietnam has emerged as a major importer of plastic scrap in recent years after China, once the top player in the industry, banned imports in 2018.

Vietnam was the world’s fourth-largest importer in 2022, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But that surge in imports has taken place as the country is struggling to recycle even its own plastic waste.

Additional restrictions could reduce the trade, but the large size of the domestic informal industry may make it hard to monitor commercial flows and recycling rates, experts and officials said.

From sorting to landfills

More than a quarter of Vietnam’s plastic recycling capacity is concentrated in craft villages like Minh Khai, the World Bank said in a 2021 report, noting that spare capacity to process imported plastic amounted to 300,000 metric tonnes.

That was well short of the 420,000 tonnes of plastic scrap Vietnam imported in 2023, which was up 11 per cent from 2022, according to UN data, which does not capture the entire volume.

Researchers have found that recycling is being hampered by the inability to properly sort plastic waste, both offshore and in Vietnam.

Only 30 per cent of plastic waste generated in Vietnam is sorted. As a result, in spite of shipment costs, Vietnam’s recyclers rely on higher-quality foreign plastic scrap, according to FiinGroup, a research firm.

But estimates suggest Vietnam recycles only up to a third of the imported plastic waste, said a research paper published in January.

That is partly because some imported plastic is often mixed with organic waste that makes it hard or impossible to treat, said one of the paper’s authors, Dr Kaustubh Thapa, from the Netherlands’ Utrecht University.

A recycler at Minh Khai village was more upbeat.

“The amount of imported waste that can’t be recycled is often about 5 per cent of the volume, but at times it goes up to 25 per cent,” said Chi, who declined to give his full name.

Most people contacted in the village in person or by phone declined to talk to journalists for fear of repercussions on their activities.

Much of the unrecycled plastic is dumped in “unsanitary” landfills, and about 15 per cent of that is directly released into the environment and the oceans.

“Exporting waste for recycling to destinations without sound recycling capacity raises questions of fairness and sustainability,” concluded the research paper by Dr Thapa and his co-authors. REUTERS