Vietnamese factory caught dumping industrial waste

By Bennett Murray

HANOI, Vietnam (AA) - Vietnamese police have caught a ceramic tile factory dumping industrial waste into a local river, local media reported Tuesday.

The factory, owned by Pak Vietnam Single-Member LLC in southern Vietnam’s Dong Nai province, was found to be pumping “black, putrid sewage” from a coolant bath for a coal gasification boiler, the Tuoi Tre newspaper reported.

The sewage, which has not yet been identified pending test results, was drained into a nearby town before ultimately settling in a seven-kilometer segment of the Thi Vai River.

Authorities have ordered Pak Vietnam to immediately cease the dumping.

The Thi Vai River, which runs through a sprawling industrial area just outside Ho Chi Minh City, has previously been the site of illegal dumping by manufacturers.

Vedan Viet Nam, a Taiwanese-owned firm that operated an MSG factory in the area, admitted to dumping untreated waste into the river in 2009 after being subject to Vietnam’s first major environmental legal investigation.

Despite paying a $6 million fine, Vedan was caught polluting again in 2015.

Industrial waste dumping has been a particularly sensitive issue in the country this year in the wake of a mass fish kill off the central Vietnamese coast in April.

A steel plant owned by the Taiwanese conglomerate Formosa Plastics Group was found guilty of causing the die-off by leaking phenol, a highly toxic substance previously used for lethal injections in Nazi Germany, and cyanide into the sea through an illegal drainage pipe.

The die-off triggered rare public protests, which are generally illegal under the rule of the country’s single party communist state, as activists protested the company's presence in Vietnam.