Vietnamese MONRE held seminar about introducing pollution control manager system

The Directorate General of Environment of Vietnam’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, in cooperation with the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (INEST) and Hanoi University of Technology, held a seminar on developing a system of pollution control managers in Vietnam on March 6, 2019. In recent years, Japanese experts have assisted the Vietnamese government in human resource development to improve the knowledge of local and central officers being in charge of environmental management and pollution prevention through training courses in Japan.

The seminar presented a roadmap on environmental protection in enterprises and pollution control management in Vietnam, laws and regulations on environmental protection, and control of water pollutants discharge in industrial estates. The preparation of a manual for introducing pollution control managers in Vietnam was highly praised by various stakeholders and the Directorate General of Environment released a detailed roadmap for the application of the pollution control manager system in factories. The application of pollution control system is a practical and beneficial activity that brings many benefits to environmental protection, so the Directorate General of Environment will complete the manual and disseminate it to enterprises. The manual is simple and practical, and requires the creation of a mobile application. Associate Prof. Nghiem Trung Dung, who represented the preparation of the manual, thanked the participants for their valuable comments at the seminar and said that they would take these comments into account when compiling the manual and related materials.

At present, the Industrial Estate Management Committee has two to five environmental managers who are responsible for guiding, inspecting and promoting the environmental protection activities in each district’s industrial estates by integrating the environmental management function into the department of construction planning. There is not yet a specialized department for environmental management in the committee, but environmental managers are assigned to the technical and operational departments, and each industrial estate has an average of one or two environmental managers. In some industrial estates, a person in charge of technical and environmental management is also assigned to manage the wastewater collection and treatment system as well. On the other hand, manufacturing companies often have one person belonging to the technical department as an environmental manager.