VietNamNet Bridge – Treating e-waste remains a difficult question to solve for environmental scientists. The volume of e-waste has been increasing year after year, while the treatment solutions still cannot bring good effects.

The village inundated in electronic waste

My Hao in the northern province of Hung Yen has been well known as the “e-waste village.” There in the locality, old TV sets, stereos, fridges are piled up, waiting for treatment.

A local resident said the discarded electronics have been collected from different localities and carried to the village, where they are put into the small scale workshops for treatment.

In general, the treatment can only help take back metals, plastics and glass. Meanwhile, the remaining parts of the electronic waste, which cannot be sold for money, will be thrown into the landfills in the village, which is not very far from houses. They have also been buried right in the village or around it.

Therefore, the visitors to the village may get surprised when seeing piles of CRT TV tubes “displayed” in some areas of the village.

The surveys conducted by the Hanoi University of Technology and the Hanoi Natural Sciences University all have shown a serious situation of the electronic waste treatment.

The researchers have found the increasingly high rate of households’ discarded electronic products year after year. The rate has increased by 200 percent over that of 10 years ago.

It is estimated that by 2020, Hanoi would have 160,000 TV sets, 97,000 computers, 178,000 fridges, 97,000 air conditioners to be discarded.

In HCM City, 700,000 TV sets, 290,000 computers, 420,000 fridges, 339,000 washing machines, 330,000 air conditioners would be thrown away by the local families by that time, according to the Hanoi University of Technology.

Toxic substances harm people’s health

Scientists said the e-waste, while waiting to be treated, has been discharging toxic substances harming people’s health.

According to Dr. Do QuangTrung from the Hanoi University of Natural Sciences, electronic waste contains big dangers for the environment and humans if it cannot be treated well. Meanwhile, to date, Vietnam still has not found the technologies which allow treating the waste well. There has not been a standardized waste collection process, while people have not received sufficient warnings about the problems they would face with the electronic waste.

The Hanoi Natural Sciences University has also found the high level leakage of heavy metals in the rice grown in Yen Phong and Tu Son districts in Bac Ninh province, the electronic waste recycling “centers.”

The scientists from the school have discovered that the lead and arsenic contents in the rice there are higher than that in neighboring areas. The lead content in the rice in Van Mon, for example, was double the content in reference sample.

60 percent of the rice samples there had the lead content higher than 0.5 mg per kilo, while it was 0.05 mg per kilo in the reference sample.

The heavy metal content in the rice is still within the safety line in accordance with the Vietnamese standards, but 30 percent of rice samples had the heavy metal content higher than allowed if referring to Japanese standards.

Thien Nhien