In response to a request from the Government of Viet Nam, the World Bank conducted this study from July 2020 to April 2021 to deepen knowledge about the different plastic waste types leaking into rivers and the ocean in Viet Nam and identify their market alternatives for potential substitution.
The report summarizes three diagnostics: field surveys on riverbanks, and at coastal sites to determine the extent of plastic pollution, and the top 10 polluting items; remote sensing and net trawl surveys that monitored plastic waste in, and alongside, waterways that flow into the ocean; and a preliminary analysis of alternatives to Vietnam’s most-polluting plastic items.
Key messages include: plastic waste was by far the most abundant type of waste collected in the field surveys; take-away food packaging waste was the most abundant source of plastic waste found in the field surveys followed by fisheries-related waste and household-related waste; and the Clean Coast Index (CCI) measurement, a tool to assess relative coastal cleanliness, showed that 71% of the coastal sites surveyed were extremely dirty.
This report is available both in English and Vietnamese.