Residents on Tan Hoa Road in District 6 in HCM City have been living next to the rubbish dump for several years. The landfill emits a bad odor when the sun shines and, when it rains, muddies residential quarters.


The elderly, young people and children have to share the same small land area. A privately run nursery school, BiBo, faces the refuse tip.

Nguyen Thu Hien, a teacher at the school, said the school used to enroll 30 children every year, but the figure has dropped to 20.

“Parents don’t want to bring their children to the school any longer because of the polluted environment,” Hien said.

The locals in District 6 are not the only victims of the pollution. Refuse tips can also be found in many other residential quarters, including on Le Van Chi Road of Thu Duc District, and Kha Van Can Street.

Another site can be seen on Le Lai Street in central District 1, where foreign tourists visit regularly. Like the other refuse tips, there are black puddles of water leaking from the refuse tip. There are also numerous garbage collection cars parked in the area, spoiling the urban landscape.

The refuse tip at the Binh Khanh Commune of Can Gio District is called the “people-founded garbage grounds”  because people throw rubbish on the site, which is reserved by city’s authorities for other purposes.

The refuse tip, located very close to the residential quarter, is as big and high as a mountain. It covers an area of 1,000 square meters, with no wall around and no waste water treatment system.

Nguyen Ngoc Nam, 47, said he was one of the first local residents in the area. Just two years after he moved there in 1997, a part of the land area turned into a refuse tip.

“It was still bearable at first, but things are getting more serious with tens of thousands of garbage brought here every day from many other communes,” Nam complained.

Nam complained that the refuse tip in the area has deprived local people of their “rice pots”.

“Debts have been burdening the local residents, but they cannot pay debts because they cannot cultivate or farm in such a polluted environment,” he said.

Ho Si Duong, who has been hatching shrimp for the last 13 years, said he has repeatedly had poor crops in recent years.

Explaining the existence of refuse tips in residential quarters, Nguyen Van Phuoc, deputy director of the HCM City Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, attributed the problem to the shortage of land in the land fund.

Phuoc said 70 percent of the refuse tips do not have the minimum 500 square meters of area mandated by city standards.

He said that the city department had asked district authorities to reserve land for refuse tips, but that has never happened.