“I and others participating in a project under which used paper and plastic items are swapped for plants and gifts respectively wish to see this highly meaningful idea run persistently, hereby considerably raising public awareness of environmental protection”.

Danh (left) and 2 other staff member of the project

The statement was made by Nguyen Tien Danh, the Director of the city-based DUTI English Centre, which operates the project dedicated to the environmental protection. 

Besides his current job, Danh is also a visiting lecturer on soft skills, design thinking and startup skills at the city’s University of Science and Technology from which he graduated many years ago.

When asked what inspired him to develop this highly practical project, Danh said, the natural environment is in desperate need of help day by day. The amount of waste is increasing year over year, whilst the public awareness of environmental protection, especially amongst young people, is not high.

“That’s the main reason why I should do something special to change people's minds about the environmental protection, starting with the smallest deeds, reducing widely-used, throw-away plastics, for instance. So, the project was born then”, said Danh.

Since the project was launched by Danh and his friends early this year, his English centre, located on Kinh Duong Vuong Street, Hoa Minh Ward, Lien Chieu District, has become a collection point for used batteries.

These colleted batteries will be sent to the Viet Nam Recycles, which is a free take-back program initiated by producers of electrical and electronic equipment for used or defective electronic products to ensure their safe and environmentally sound recycling.

Accordingly, all used or defective electronic products returned through the Viet Nam Recycles are safely collected and professionally processed to achieve maximum recovery of natural resources and ensure highly professional waste treatment.

On display at this English centre are colourful small-sized plant pots made from discarded water plastic bottles, lovely flower vases or toys made from used plastic straws.

Here are colourful flower vases and decorative items made from plastic waste

Visitors to this venue are strongly impressed and surprised to see that plastic waste, which usually ends up at dumps, could be transformed into practical daily items.

These environmentally-friendly items are presented as gifts to those who bring paper and plastic wastes to the centre.

Parts of the collected unsorted paper and plastic wastes are used to created gifts, whilst the rest are sold to raise funds for social activities.

As scheduled, the project runs 3 waste collection occasions on a yearly basis.

The first one takes place after the Lunar New Year festival when a large amount of waste, including confectionery packaging waste, plastic bottles and cans, are thrown away. The second one falls in June when university and junior college students clean up their rented accommodations before living for their hometowns for their school summer holidays, and waste collection at this time is in response to the World Environment Day (5 June). The last one is held in August when tertiary students start their new academic year.

The project has been receiving high applause from the public, and attracted the participations from students

Since the start of this year, the programme has collected a total of more than 700kg of paper and nearly 50kg of plastic - very impressive “figures”- from 2 rounds of exchange.

More recently, held at the city’s University of Science and Technology on 14 and 15 August, the swapping of used paper and plastic items for plants and gifts respectively attracted the active participation of many students here.

Danh now hopes that the project would run for a long time, and expand into other locations across the city. “Once people have better awareness of how to use paper economically and reduce the use of plastic items, our environment will stay clean and beautiful”, said Danh.