According to HCMC Department of Natural Resources and Environment, the City disposes of 9,500 tons of domestic solid waste every day, in which plastic waste accounts for a high proportion (ranked after organic waste only), about more than 1,500 tons. The amount of waste increases on average from 6 – 10% per year. The rapid increase of municipal solid waste, which has diverse and complex properties and composition, has put pressure on the waste management, collection, transportation and treatment.
The pilot project `Enhancing plastic packaging collection, sorting and recycling’, implemented by the Institut de la Recherche pour le Development (IRD) and the Hanoi Architectural University (HAU), is funded by the ‘Rethinking Plastics – Circular Economy Solutions to Marine Litter’ project of the European Union and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). ‘Rethinking Plastics’ is implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and Expertise France.
To fulfill all the activities of the pilot project, IRD contracted with ENDA to elaborate and conduct social surveys along the post consumers plastic packaging value chain (including consumers, domestic and recyclable aggregators, transporters, recyclers) in order to identify and report in HCMC on the difficulties encountered for the sorting, collection, monitoring and traceability of waste.
