VND16 bil. for automatic wastewater monitors
By Van Nam - The Saigon Times Daily
HCMC – The HCMC Department of Natural Resources and Environment has asked the city government for approval to spend some VND16 billion installing automatic industrial wastewater monitors in concentrated industrial zones.
Tran Nguyen Hien, head of the department’s Environment Management Office, said the facilities would help the department control the quality of industrial wastewater discharged from one high-tech park, three export processing zones and 10 industrial parks in the city.
Sensors will be placed at the outlet of the wastewater treatment facility of each park to record and transfer data about the discharged industrial wastewater, such as pH, DO, COD and TSS (total suspended solids) to a control center at the department 24 hours.
Based on the certified indexes, the environment authority will impose penalties on any industrial park that fails to meet the requirements for wastewater disposal.
The city’s industrial parks and export processing zones have nearly 1,000 operational enterprises that dispose of some 32,000 cubic meters of industrial wastewater a day.
The environment department is considering placing orders for automatic monitoring devices from the German firm WTW because these German devices are reportedly suitable for Vietnam’s existing telecommunications infrastructure.
Early this year, the environment department reported that in the next few years it would install automatic monitors at companies discharging much wastewater outside the industrial parks.
The budget for this wastewater monitoring scheme is VND100 billion.