Manufacturers address future of recycling solutions

Manufacturers and importers are proposing to retain the current form of financial contribution to the Vietnam Environmental Protection Fund to support recycling, instead of the provision in the draft Environmental Protection Law that allows businesses to recover and recycle themselves or transfer waste to recycling units.

- By Nguyen Oanh

Many foreign-invested manufacturers and importers, such as members of the Vietnam Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (VAMA), expressed concerns to the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment (MAE) in April over proposed amendments to the recycling responsibility regulations in Article 54 of the draft Law on Environmental Protection.

According to the draft, Clause 2 of Article 54 is amended to remove the form of financial contribution to the Vietnam Environmental Protection Fund to support recycling, replacing it with four forms, namely recovery, self-recycling, or transfer to recycling units.

VAMA and groups such as Panasonic Vietnam believe this change will have a significant impact on the implementation of extended producer responsibility, especially for businesses importing and trading electrical and electronic products.

“In essence, Panasonic Vietnam is an import and trading company. We do not have manufacturing or recycling operations in Vietnam, and do not own internal recycling infrastructure or capabilities. It is highly impractical for the company to directly organise and carry out its own recycling obligations,” Nguyen Hoang Kim, senior service manager at Panasonic Vietnam, said at a conference organised on the issue in mid-April.

Importing and trading businesses like Panasonic Vietnam are limited in their ability to independently verify the volume of products that have actually been recycled, Kim said. In the absence of a centralised verification and monitoring mechanism by state management agencies regarding actual recycling results, businesses face difficulties in ensuring and proving that they have met the mandatory recycling rate.