In August 2026, every year, Vietnam throws away 2.62 million tonnes of usable plastic. PET bottles, milk jugs, food tubs, and packaging film. Not littered, not lost at sea. Collected as waste, then buried or burned. The World Bank values what is destroyed in the process at $2.2 billion to $2.9 billion a year.
The information quoted above is as per the residents of the country. One of the most disturbing facts to digest is that the country excels in recycling. It recovers about a third of its main plastic resins, which is a respectable figure for a country at its income level. It has a real recycling industry, a real collection network, and since 2024, a real producer-pays law as well. Hence, it is clear that capacity is not the failure, and not even the public discipline. It is the formula.
Vietnam's Law on Environmental Protection of 2020 introduced extended producer responsibility (EPR), the principle that whoever sells the packaging should pay for what happens to it afterwards, rather than leaving the bill with the city. Obligations began on January 1, 2024, for packaging, batteries, lubricants, and tyres. Electronics followed in 2025. Vehicles arrive in 2027.
A company has a choice. Organise the recycling itself, hire a licensed recycler or a producer responsibility organisation, or pay the Vietnam Environmental Protection Fund, and be done with it.
If it pays, the bill is calculated like this: F = R × V × Fs. Here, V is the weight of the packaging that the company put on the market. R is the mandatory recycling rate for that material. Fs is the official recycling cost norm, in dong per kilogramme.
It is stated as good design to follow. It is published, arithmetic, auditable, and does not depend on a market in traded certificates whose price nobody can explain. A company’s sums can be easily checked by anyone with a calculator. Which is exactly why the numbers inside it matter so much.
Start with R. For plastic packaging, it runs between 10 per cent and 22 per cent. Rigid PET sits at the top, at 22 per cent.
So a company that sells 100 tonnes of PET bottles is answerable for 22 tonnes. The remaining 78 tonnes are free. Not deferred, not phased in. Simply outside the obligation.
Then comes Fs, and this is where it stops being a rounding question. Fs was never meant to cover the whole cost of recycling a kilogram of plastic. It is the public top-up that makes the work worth doing, where the resale value alone won't pay for it, which is why the fight over it was a fight about small numbers. Vietnam's own recyclers said on the record what the PET number should be.
At the drafting consultations in late 2023, the Vietnam Recycled Plastics Association and the packaging recycling alliance asked for 3,900 dong a kilogram, about $0.15, or Rs 14, against the 1,900 dong ($0.07, Rs 6.90) then in the draft. Adjustment coefficients, most of them below one, trimmed rather than lifted the figure. When the schedule was finally issued, rigid PET landed at 1,979 dong a kilogram, $0.08, or Rs 7.20, roughly half what the people who would do the recycling had asked for.
Flexible packaging makes the same point without the arithmetic caveat, because there is no resale value to argue about. The draft norm was 6,000 dong a kilogram ($0.23, Rs 22). A survey by the group Green Future put the real cost of collecting and treating the same material at 10,600 dong ($0.40, Rs 39).
Now multiply the two together, because that is what the law does. On PET, 1,979 dong at a 22 per cent rate works out to about 435 dong for every kilogramme a company puts on the market. Call it two US cents, or Rs 1.60.
A Japanese company pays about Rs 35 a kilo for plastic packaging. India’s own notified ceiling is Rs 7.90 (for MLP), a figure that sits well below what Indian cities actually spend to collect and treat the same material, according to the latest report by Delhi-based think tank Centre for Science and Environment, titled Policy, Practice and Plastic: Cost of Managing Plastic Waste in Indian Cities. Vietnam, having written the most transparent formula of the three, has produced the cheapest rate.
Vietnam and India are sailing in the same boat under such circumstances, with the same informal workforce, the same sachet economy, and the same instinct to legislate ahead of infrastructure. Vietnam is approximately two years ahead in implementation, making it worth reading carefully rather than admiring.
24 August 2026
24 August 2026
24 August 2026
24 August 2026