The Vietnamese government will need around $16 billion to invest in various wastewater treatment and environmental sanitation projects next decade, an official of the Ministry of Construction said.
Nguyen Hong Tien, head of the ministry’s Technical Infrastructure Department, made the announcement at a recent conference on managing and treating wastewater in Vietnam’s urban areas with the participation of the German Technical Cooperation’s (GTZ) in Hanoi. Wastewater treatment is a pressing issue in Vietnam’s cities, Tien said, elaborating that only six cities have concentrated wastewater treatment systems with a total number of 14 facilities. He attributed that many big cities, including the central cities of Quy Nhon and Nha Trang have not yet built centralized wastewater treatment stations. Wastewater is preliminary being treated in tanks and then discharged into the environment. In many cities, numerous households have not linked their sewage to the common urban drainage system but are still discharging wastewater directly to the environment, he added. By end-2009, only 74 out of 171 operating industrial parks across Vietnam had built their own wastewater treatment systems. Hanoi is estimated to discharge nearly 670,000 cubic meters of wastewater per day, including 400,000 cubic meters from urban areas, with only 7% of the total figure is being treated. Meanwhile, HCM City discharges nearly 1.2 million cubic meters of wastewater into the environment a day, and the city plans to build nine large wastewater treatment facilities by 2020. Vietnam has poured more than $2 billion into hygiene and wastewater treatment projects over the past 20 years, with 80% of which sourced from official development assistance (ODA). (vietnamnet.vn Dec 13)
