Lesson 2: Homemade "technologies"
(Baonghean) -Small industrial parks, where industrial facilities are located in residential areas. Many facilities use outdated and homemade production lines to process plastic, sacks, and nylon bags, causing serious pollution to surrounding households.
In the scorching summer sun, walking into the towering "mountains of trash" at Mr. Tran Van Duc's plastic granule processing facility (Dien Hong Small Industrial Park) one has to cover one's nose because of the smell from used sacks and plastic bags.
On the towering piles of garbage are girls aged 14 to 16 "swimming" in it to sort and process. Inside the place where the garbage is boiled to make plastic pellets are also children, but they are boys, collecting piles of garbage in a dark water tank to wash, then let them operate on a small conveyor belt, from there grind them into fibers and put them into a pot to melt into plastic streams like "vermicelli". The "vermicelli" is cooled through a water channel and crushed into plastic pellets with the characteristic blue-black color of recycled plastic. These plastic pellets will be sold to other facilities to produce household plastic, water industry supplies, sedge mats, etc. The scariest thing is that the children immerse themselves in the water tank to wash the garbage, scoop them into each bucket to put them on the conveyor belt and then stir the garbage next to the boiling furnace, without masks or protective clothing.
Hung Linh plastic factory is located next to a residential garden.
Not only Mr. Duc's facility, in the small Dien Hong Industrial Park - Nghe An, there are 18 other facilities that grind solid packaging, trade scrap, grind plastic pellets such as Mr. Phan, Mr. Nam, Mr. Vinh, Mr. Canh... Most of these facilities are manual production, with outdated processing lines, and do not have smoke and odor treatment equipment, causing serious pollution in the area. In this Industrial Park, there are two other polluting enterprises from smelting scrap iron and producing steel billets, namely Hung Thinh Trading Joint Stock Company and Kim Anh Company Limited. Scrap iron is collected here, put into a furnace with honeycomb coal, forming steel billets and then rolled into steel bars to sell on the market. According to experts, this steel furnace produces heavy dust and smoke, only floating, so the surrounding area is covered by this toxic "mist". Wastewater from the steel furnace is taken to tanks and discharged into the common tank of the industrial park once a week. The industrial park has two small ponds that hold untreated waste, which when full flows into the river in Dien Hong.
Pollution in the small "Industrial Park" of Dien Hong, according to Mr. Nguyen Hong Trung - Head of the Industrial Park Management Board, is due to the fact that the facilities and enterprises import too much waste from Laos, the land area of some facilities is too small, so the waste is not placed in the right place, the exhaust fumes pollute the surrounding areas. In addition, some production facilities do not comply with the environmental protection regulations of the People's Committee of the commune, the Management Board, the drainage system is congested but cannot be resolved. The entire industrial park has not yet had a general environmental impact assessment. The drainage system of the industrial park is currently clogged.
At Hung Dung Small Industrial Park (Vinh City), a business that causes serious environmental pollution is Hung Linh Plastic Joint Stock Company. The company's factory is built on a total area of 6,052m2. In the environmental protection commitment of this company made in March 2010, the factory's location in the Northeast borders planned road No. 2, the Southeast borders road No. 13, the Northwest borders planned road, and the Southwest borders the wastewater ditch of the industrial park. But in reality, this factory has two sides located entirely in residential gardens. There are 5 households whose houses are adjacent to the factory with only 10m of land, while according to regulations, the factory fence must be 500m away from residential houses. The fact that the factory is located entirely in a residential area causes the entire Hoa Tien - Hung Loc hamlet to suffer from the toxic smoke and noise of the factory.
The company's environmental protection commitment also clearly states: "The company invested in a production line for household plastic products and water industry supplies from imported plastic materials, with a capacity of 400 tons of products/year." However, from the time it started production until July this year, the company still used scrap plastic for production. Previously, the company used a plastic cooking line to cook plastic sandals and other types of purchased waste plastic. After Nghe An Environmental Police requested the company to remove the plastic cooking line that emitted toxic fumes to residents, the company switched to grinding scrap plastic.
It should also be added that Hung Dung Small Industrial Park does not have a centralized wastewater treatment system. "Each family takes care of its own business" is a common scene here.
PVKT Group
