Redesigning a Plastic-Free Future for Vietnam

Nguyen Thi Dep, whose first name means “beauty” in Vietnamese, lives with her family in a poor neighbourhood in Binh Thanh District in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), southern Vietnam. In her mid-50s, Dep still makes a living as a waste picker. For those unfamiliar with the term, a waste picker is an individual who collect, transfer, sort, and pre-treat waste. 

Although Dep does not say how long she has been doing this job, she says since 2021, she started using Veca, a mobile app that allows sellers to arrange transactions of recycled waste and get paid by pickers who collect door-to-door. “My friends introduced me to this app, saying it was very helpful for workers like us,” Dep shares.

A waste picker’s dream

Since using Veca, things have improved. Before using the app, she had to push her old cart around the streets, relying on luck to find used items such as plastic bottles that could be resold for cash. “Now everything is like a dream. Whenever I receive a notification that someone is putting a scrap order from the app, I ride my motorbike to the seller’s house and make the transaction. No more walking or wandering around the streets,” Dep says with relief. She now earns more than four times what she did in the past.

Providing stable income for waste pickers is one of the motivations behind the Veca concept, according to co-founder Bui The Bao. “The idea of Veca came up in 2018 when I was working at a paper recycling plant. Back then, waste segregation in our community was not good so many recyclables end up at landfills. Meanwhile companies recycling paper or other materials were facing shortages of waste products,” Bao said.

In April 2021, Bao teamed up with his high school classmate Do Thi Minh Trang to launch Veca, a mobile app  that connects households who want to sell recyclables with waste pickers and recycling aggregators in HCMC. After it was relaunched in December 2021 due to Covid-19, Veca has expanded to 19 districts in HCMC. It has received funding from the U.S Agency for International Development (USAID), which has been especially supportive in providing orientation and strategy planning.

Startups like Veca are part of a growing entrepreneurship trend in Vietnam aimed at preventing plastic from ending up in the natural environment. Informal waste workers like Dep are collecting over 30% of recyclable plastic in the country, according to some unofficial estimates. Meanwhile, in 2023, Veca was able to recycle 120 tons of plastic.

First ‘bottle to bottle’ factory in Vietnam

The next major link in this recycle plastic chain is the factory. Duy Tan Plastic Recycling is running the first “bottle to bottle” recycling technology factory in Vietnam. If plastic bottles previously only had one product life cycle, this kind of technology can potentially increase it by 50 times. To achieve this, each used plastic bottle is recycled into reusable plastic pellets. Recycling plastic materials may help minimise the use of fossil fuels. 

In an interview via email, Le Anh, Director of Sustainable Development of Duy Tan Plastic Recycling, wrote that last year, the factory in Long An province recycled over 2.4 billion plastic bottles collected domestically, compared with 1.3 billion bottles in the previous year. The target for 2024 is double from 2023 to 5 billion bottles. He also mentioned that the factory adheres to the to the “three-no” criteria in the production process: zero waste, zero emission, and zero waste water, with 80% of the water being reused.

Besides selling plastic pellets as raw materials for large FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods)

partner companies in Vietnam, Duy Tan Plastic Recycling has been able to export recycled plastic products to 16 countries, including the US and EU. On the list of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) recyclers announced in February, Duy Tan Recycling is one of facilities southern Viet Nam capable of recycling plastic.

“Reducing environmental pollution from plastic waste in Vietnam is at the core value of our production; from the very beginning we have built a plastic waste collection network with nearly 2,900 collection partners and more than 100 satellite stations from Da Nang to the south of Vietnam,” Anh said. 

Challenges and solutions

However, challenges are always there. One of them is low levels of waste separation at source, according to both Bao and Anh. Collection and recycling activities are still small-scale, spontaneous, and mainly done manually. Furthermore, Anh points out that there are still no standards for recycled plastic food packaging and no clear regulations on mandatory recycling rates for output to facilitate recycling efforts.

Anh, who is also the Vice Chairman of Vietnam Waste Recycling Association, suggested several measures for the Vietnamese government to support companies in the recycling sector. These include:  implementing waste classification at source, initiating more programmes to raise awareness, and promote recycling products, and establishing standards for recycled products.

In 2022, Vietnam became the first country in Southeast Asia to enact “Extended Producer Responsibility” (EPR) regulations. EPR went into effect in early 2024, making companies with products that use plastic bags responsible for the cost of disposal by consumers. 

According to a World Bank study conducted between July 2020 and April 2021, single-use plastics comprised 62 percent of the total plastic waste leak into rivers and the ocean. Needless to say, single-use plastics represent the biggest part of plastic waste in Vietnam.

One example illustrating the widespread use of single-use plastic in Vietnam is a coffee cart in Bihn Dong Street along Doi Canal in District 8, HCMC. From 5:30 am until 10:30 on any day, this coffee cart can sell nearly 140 iced coffee in plastic cups, whether with condensed milk or black. 

Each coffee plastic cup usually comes with free iced tea also in a plastic cup of the same size. The combo just costs from 14,000 VND (19.15 baht), enough to satisfy the local demand for early morning coffee culture. Along a 20-meter stretch of a road, you can easily find three coffee carts like this.

To address this alarming situation, the Vietnamese government established a national action plan on marine plastic debris. This includes banning the production and importation of plastic bags by 2026 and most single-use plastic products by 2031. In line with this, there are projects from foreign institutions supporting the development and implementation of plastic management programmes in Vietnam.

Mira Nagy, implementation manager at Go Circular, GIZ Vietnam, mentioned in response to an email interview that the regional Single-Use Plastics Challenge by the PREVENT Waste Alliance has been supporting 17 startups in Vietnam in reducing single-use plastic waste within the food and beverage industry since 2022. 

Building on this experience, the Towards Zero Waste Accelerator was launched in August to further support innovative circular solutions and start-ups in Vietnam across various sectors. By the end of September, they will work with industry experts on finding their product-market fit, secure funding, and assess their impact.  

Since circular business propositions are still new and therefore perceived as riskier for investors, and with very few dedicated financial instruments are in place, circular solutions struggle to access the finance needed to scale their business. “Together with our Vietnamese partners, we are working to address these challenges in the near future,” Nagy said.

Another ongoing project in Soc Trang province focuses on addressing the urgency of plastic waste pollution, according to Daniel Herrmann, Head of the Climate Policy Unit, GIZ Vietnam. Central to the project is collaboration with local authorities to develop a comprehensive action plan for waste segregation at the source.

In addition, the project has introduced a bamboo waste trap model to capture both land-based and marine waste, particularly in coastal areas plagued by pollution from single-use plastics and discarded fishing nets. These traps, made from renewable bamboo, help protect mangrove ecosystems while also contributing to the recycling of collected waste.

If fishing nets can be recycled into bags, offering a practical and eco-friendly alternative to single-use plastic bags in Soc Trang in GIZ project, USAID distributes beautifully designed plastic totes for coffee cups from used nylon bags. A product from Limloop based in HCMC, each cup holder upcycle 15-50g used plastic, crafted by the Deaf workers.

Mimi Bui, a Vietnamese American graduate of California State University, Fullerton, who recently visited her homeland, Vietnam, thought that breathing new life —into used plastics, especially by turning them into fashionable items — was a brilliant idea. She pointed out the ways to reduce plastic use in daily life. “For example, instead of plastic bins or baskets, we can use handwoven ones from water hyacinth, which is abundant in Vietnam,” she said. She also suggested to bring reusable bags and bottles to the market or to school. “ It's first and foremost about reducing the use of plastics and trying to recycle and reuse,” she added.

Dep is now eligible for health insurance covered by Veca. The more people sell recycled waste through the Veca app, the more money she earns. “I hope my income will go up 6-7 times if more people use the app, that’s all I asked,” she says.

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Nguyen Thuy Mien  is a senior journalist at Thanh Nien Newspaper. A full-time journalist since 2004, she is covering different fields including international affairs, science and environment.

Disclaimer: This published work was prepared with the support of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. The views and analysis contained in the work are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the foundation. The author is responsible for any liability claims against copyright breaches of graphics, photograph, images, audio, and text used.