Two things — VietEcon

Sorry, but I can’t find anything that really hits me hard today, so I am going to work on a few other things for future posts. In the meantime, I saw two things that are mildly interesting:

First, this story, about the Vietnamese historian being kicked out of the communist party, has gotten some legs in the West. The New York Times covered it. It is an ancillary to the larger story about Chinese influence around the world, which is something that the New York Times, in particular, has focused on. And it is also part of the larger worldwide Facebook story, since Vietnam has strict laws around data in social media networks.

It will be interesting to see what the Vietnamese government will do to tamp down anti-Chinese sentiment. It’s a concern for them, given earlier protests against China’s moves into the South China Sea. Plus, it is quite interesting that nationalism, in the vein of anti-Chinese sentiment, has become such a complex path to weave in Vietnam. In some ways, the Vietnamese government was built on nationalism. From my view, and it could very well be wrong, the driving forces of the resistance to the US and the Southern Vietnamese government was nationalism, independence and reunification. And now, the government is facing difficulties containing a similar nationalism. As China flexes its muscles in Vietnam and around the South China Sea, this is going to continue to be an issue.

It’s funny that all of this came out around the same time that Cu Rua, a turtle that is a symbol of national resistance to the Chinese, was mummified and displayed.

HCMC WASTE PER DAY. SOURCE: DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT

Second, I liked this short article about HCMC promoting waste-to-energy projects. In the article, if these numbers are correct, then the first waste project is extremely profitable. The plant treated 500 tonnes, then converted 35 tonnes to 7 million kWhs. It cost a total of VND7.5m (USD32.6k) to treat the waste (at a cost of VND1.5m per tonne). The revenue side was double. The 7m kWhs brought in USD735k (at USD0.15 per kWh). The figure per kWh is higher than feed-in tarrifs for solar (I wrote about this a bit more in a post on Feb. 19, 2019).

There are plans for more waste-to-energy plants. The owner of the first plant would like to expand it to take in 1,000 tonnes to produce 20MW a day. Another plant looks like it is in the works.

It’s funny that there are plants like this going up in Vietnam, but the rest of the world is trying to figure out what to do with all of its waste. Recent articles have all been about how China is no longer taking waste and the impact on recycling in the US. Not just the US, but Europe as well.

Vietnam is one of the places that has increased the amount of waste it is taking (according to that last article). But earlier this year it stopped issuing waste import permits. That’s because China stopped taking recycling for a reason: the environment issues it produces. Vietnam would do better trying to convert its own waste, get better at that, and then start to see if they can do the same with imported waste.