More than half of the medical waste incinerators in Vietnam have been left unused because their owners do not have money to pay for fuel and maintenance. Especially, they still do not know how to treat the toxic heavy metals in the ashes.

“The incinerators are the gifts from foreign institutions, and they can use the one they want. But they have not used any of the incinerators.”

http://news.chaobuoisang.net/50-percent-of-medical-waste-incinerators-left-idle-182286.htm

The problem is that the hospitals cannot arrange money to run the incinerators. A kilo of oil would cost 20,000 dong, which means that in order to burn one kilo of toxic medical waste, they would have to spend 80,000 dong. Meanwhile, the total cost would be 10,000 dong per kilo in Japan.

80,000 Vietnamese dong is slightly less than £2.50.

According to Dr Nga, Head of the Department for Preventive Medicine under the Ministry of Health, there are 490 medical waste incinerators in Vietnam, of which just 276 are operational.

Provincial incinerators will run if the provincial authorities accept to allocate budget. If authorities do not give a nod, the incinerators will stay untouched. An incinerator needs 60 million dong a month or around £1,800, to operate. This is unaffordable for most hospitals.

The process of treating solid waste is carried out in different ways at different hospitals, because the technologies are also different. The fact that many incinerators have been left idle means that hazardous waste cannot be treated, which may go out to the environment and bring germs to people. In other words, the fallback position is to dump untreated waste.

Regulation is meaningless without an effective and fully-funded infrastructure. In its part, those providing gifts of aid are to be lauded for their generosity, but without covering operating costs or ensuring that hardware is suitably low tech and can operate under prevailing technological, political and financial constraints, these gifts are of little real value.