The massive failure of the attempt at a public recycling program in Da Nang, Vietnam

This city is a touristy one and they make a bunch of attempts at attempting to appear 1st world and when I say that I am not trying to be insulting to Vietnam. However, this is not a first world country and it is far from it especially when it comes to waste disposal. The garbage and especially the plastic waste problem in this country is immense and statistics all around the world will attest to the fact that Vietnam is one of the largest polluters on the planet.

In our tourist area they attempted to create an artificial image of western-style environmental concern and at first I applauded it but seriously had my doubts that it would ever actually amount to anything.

Well here we are just a few months later and the recycling bins that have been placed around the area are already not even use at all anymore.

I do not know what those words say in Vietnamese, but I do know for a fact that this once was a bin with separate compartments for aluminum, plastic, and even batteries to be deposited. The instructions were written in Vietnamese, Korean, English, and Chinese. It didn't take long before people were just depositing whatever in these bins though, and it wasn't at all separated properly.

You can see in this picture that it is mostly just filled with plastic bags which is a good example of what most of the streets look like as well. As you may well be aware, plastic bags the likes of which you receive for buying something at a minimart cannot be recycled.

Another problem was that recycling is actually a money maker for the people that wander around digging through bins looking for things that can be sold to businesses that actually operate as recycling for money centers. The people who do this for a living would break into the recycling boxes in order to get all the cans and bottles and I thought it was kind of stupid, or even mean, that the city who installed these deposit boxes would ever lock them in the first place.

Then other bad things started happening. The recycling bins themselves are made of steel, and this fetches a pretty good sum of money at the recycling centers, so the bins themselves started disappearing from the streets also. What better way to encourage recycling than to have thieves steal, and then recycle, the recycling bins themselves?

The few of these things that remain are just an eyesore now and they never were actually used for whatever the intended purpose actually was. They are now just very ugly pieces of garbage on the side of the road that the city honestly should just remove.

I don't think that Vietnam is ready for a mass environmental movement and I am not judging them when I say this either. A vast majority of the population here is what westerners would consider desperately poor and when you are in that state, I think that your concern for the cleanliness of the beaches is something that kind of gets put on the back burner because you are instead concerned about how you are going to be able to afford to eat.

The road to disaster is paved with good intentions as they say. I believe that the government had a very virtuous idea in mind when they made these things but as predicted, it took less than a year before the entire thing fell apart and now no one even tries to use them anymore. Pity! But this was always going to happen.