Exploring Formal and Informal waste management infrastructure: the case of Central Hanoi, Vietnam
Quyen Hanh Nguyen
Abstract
My research is an exploratory project about waste and what it entails: global and local inequality, environmental issues, environmental injustices, social boundaries, re-evaluation of objects and people, their agency and aspirations.Project Description
Growing up in Hanoi, Vietnam, the talks of people complaining about how dirty the city is have become a part of my childhood. The oozing of “waste” everywhere in the capital, in any form, represents how chaotic and poor Vietnam still is compared to more developed East and Southeast Asian countries. The large amount of solid waste in Vietnam, imported from Global North countries and produced from excessive consumption behaviour of the Vietnamese, is a disturbing problem for most urban residents. The waste flows from the Global North to the Global South, from the cities to more remoted areas, perpetuate the patterns of global and local inequalities.During my multilocal field research in Vietnam from August to October 2023, I followed the flows of household solid waste and explored the informal and formal waste management infrastructure of the country. With my main focus on Hanoi, my initial interest was to see why the country imports thousands of tons of garbage despite lacking adequate infrastructures, functional legal frameworks, and governance, and how it handles such an enormous amount. During my fieldwork, in which I applied participant observation, informal talk and semi-structured interview, I came into contact with various actors in and outside the recycling industry as well as learned about their perspectives on “the waste problem”. Waste is still considered something dirty and disturbing, but some people can also find something valuable mixed in the dirty mess that they could sell and earn more income, sustaining their livelihoods from the discarded. With their practices of waste handling, recycling, sorting, and selling, people interact with different materials, all become a part of the “waste infrastructure” in Vietnam.
From there, I aim to reevaluate the roles of the informal waste system and various waste actors who were treated unfairly or looked down on due to their social status associated with the stigma of waste work. While I do not deny the shortcomings of the informal waste workers who handle waste in a non-eco-friendly way resulting in many environmental and health consequences, at the same time, I wanted to acknowledge their roles in the informal system that supports and becomes inseparable from the inadequate formal waste management, both constituting a lively, chaotic, and incomplete waste infrastructure in Vietnam.
About Me
Currently, I am in my 5th semester of master’s degree, majoring in social and cultural anthropology. I studied bachelor’s in social sciences at University of Hannover. During a quantitative social study about public health, I went to a coastal slum area Indonesia to collect data and got interested in the waste problem. That was when many Southeast Asian countries sent tons of trash back to the Global North, refusing to be the world’s dumping ground. For me, the topic of waste is somewhat personal, as I grew up with the talks about it. Frustrating. Powerless. Hopeless. I could recall many sorts of negative emotions when I think back on these talks, as all efforts to keep waste “in check” seem to be impossible. But the experience in Indonesia changed my way of thinking, as I heard people in the slum area use waste to build houses as a way of adapting to land subsidence and sea level rise. What if waste is not always something unwanted but there are other stories behind it as well? I followed the topic with frustration and curiosity and got to see another side of the city where I was born, the side of the marginalized people, for whom some kinds of discarded are valuable.If you are also interested in the same topic, please let me know: nghanhquyen@gmail.com