HCMC – The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment held a meeting in Hanoi City today, December 18, to prompt the relevant agencies to quickly crack the whip on many facilities polluting the environment.
To date, 82 facilities causing pollution have yet to be handled, said Nguyen Pham Ha, deputy head of the Waste Management Division under the Vietnam Environment Administration.
Some 17 of the total comprise production facilities, industrial parks and industrial clusters in Bac Ninh, Binh Thuan, Dak Nong, Long An, Nghe An, Quang Binh, Tra Vinh, Yen Bai and Quang Tri provinces, while 65 others are public facilities such as hospitals, landfills and education and training facilities.
Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Vo Tuan Nhan said that the handling of environmental pollution has failed to meet requirements, so relevant agencies should pinpoint the reasons for the failure and clarify the responsibility of units to speed up the handling effectively.
Some ministries and departments proposed that leaders of localities be held responsible for the handling and conduct an annual inspection over facilities to find those that are polluting the environment and add them to the list of polluting facilities.
The facilities that have successfully stopped polluting the environment should be publicized and monitored regularly, while localities should map out plans to handle those that continue to pollute, VietnamPlus news site reported.
The ministry also urged the competent agencies of these provinces, which are home to polluting facilities, to impose sanctions on them in line with the prevailing regulations and suspend the operations of these facilities until they address environmental pollution problems.
Besides, the governments of provinces and cities were told to proactively spend the local budget to handle pollution to avoid delays and penalize the heads of public facilities that were allocated funding to stop pollution, but failed to do so.
