Thanh Lien: Building a waste incinerator at home

(Baonghean) - In the past 2 years, Thanh Lien commune, Thanh Chuong district has had a policy of mobilizing and encouraging people to treat waste at home by building manual incinerators. The incinerators are designed simply and cost little, so people have responded and agreed to implement them...

Coming to Thanh Lien commune, passing through the fields, occasionally there appear vertical cement culverts on the banks of the fields, plots or on the side of the roads in the fields. At schools, commune People's Committee offices, hamlet cultural houses... there are bins built in hidden corners. Those are the manual waste incinerators built by investment units.

Mr. Phan Ba ​​Ngoc - Chairman of the Commune People's Committee, said: In the 19 criteria for building a new rural area, there are criteria on environment and household waste treatment, which are very difficult to implement, for many reasons. According to regulations, if a commune's centralized waste collection and treatment point is built, it must be 3 km away from residential areas and away from water sources. Thus, for a semi-mountainous locality like Thanh Lien, there cannot be a suitable location. This reality makes the local environmental treatment work very difficult. In that seemingly deadlocked situation, through the press, some localities in the country have mobilized people to build incinerators on a family and group scale, bringing high efficiency in environmental protection. In early 2013, the local Party Committee and government issued a policy to build incinerators from the fields to units, agencies and families. First of all, the commune prioritizes the construction of incinerators in the fields and schools, health stations, commune People's Committee headquarters... If it is effective, it will be replicated in each household. In the fields, after each harvest, the amount of agricultural waste is very large, while people's awareness is not high, they still carelessly use pesticides or other agricultural tools, so the waste is thrown everywhere, affecting the water environment, even stepping on hard objects when wading into the fields.

Incinerator of Mr. Tran Van Hoa's family, hamlet 8 Lien Chau.

After having incinerators in the fields, people voluntarily collected waste in one place, the fields were clean. Since then, the commune has stepped up propaganda and mobilized people to invest in building incinerators at home, with each household building one incinerator. Any family that registers to build an incinerator will receive 50,000 VND from the commune. For families, the incinerator is designed with 2 compartments. One compartment holds waste that needs to be processed, one compartment holds plastic bottles, aluminum, etc. that can be recycled to sell as waste. The waste incinerator compartment is designed to be about 1m2 wide, from the bottom up about 30cm, with a ledge built to support a steel mesh. The steel mesh is made of 6mm steel, after burning, the ash falls to the bottom of the furnace. The furnace is also covered with cement sheets to avoid rainwater. In just a short time, hundreds of households in the commune voluntarily registered to build incinerators in their gardens. Up to now, the whole commune has built 1,113 incinerators, accounting for over 50% of households in the commune.

Coming to Mr. Tran Van Hoa's family in Hamlet 8 - Lien Chau, we saw a garbage incinerator in the corner of the garden, although not completed, but can be put into use. Mr. Hoa said: The surrounding families have already built incinerators, seeing the practical efficiency, I also built like them. The incinerator should have been designed with 2 compartments, but the family used sacks to store recyclable waste, such as beer cans, plastic bottles... to sell as scrap. This incinerator is built square 1m, 80cm high, about 30cm from the bottom up, with a ledge to place a steel mesh. On top is a layer of proximang to prevent rainwater from entering the incinerator. The cost to build this incinerator only requires 50kg of cement, 150 bricks, a little sand and 1 day of labor. Mr. Hoa’s wife said that every day when she comes home from the market, she sees so many plastic bags containing food. Before, they were just thrown around, with dogs and cats carrying them everywhere. Every time she went to the garden, she saw plastic bags, which was unhygienic and polluted the environment. Now, there is an incinerator, and all kinds of burnable waste, such as plastic bags, eggshells, toilet paper, etc., are put in here. When there is a lot, they are burned.

The way to use the incinerator is very simple. When there is garbage, people just need to put it in the furnace, including plastic bags, rubber and other solid waste. When the furnace is full of garbage, just need a little firewood, or dry leaves under the iron mesh, light the fire, the garbage will slowly burn out. By burning like this, garbage that is difficult to decompose in the natural environment, such as plastic bags, rubber tires, shoe soles... burn into charcoal. The biggest advantage of the home incinerator is that the elderly and children can clean up their own families and neighbors without much time and effort, forming a common awareness of environmental protection...

Mr. Phan Ba ​​Ngoc added: The benefit after the commune launched the movement to build incinerators at home is that the sense of responsibility of each citizen for environmental protection has been raised, thereby greatly limiting the situation of littering in alleys and public places. Thanh Lien commune strives to have 100% of households have incinerators at home by the end of 2015. To achieve that goal, the commune has recently requested the district to support funding to continue to encourage the remaining households to build incinerators.

Video clip of incinerator at home in Thanh Lien (Thanh Chuong):

Xuan Hoang