Vietnam pollution fight hits supplier to global fashion brands
HANOI: Vietnamese villagers blockading a textile plant that serves global fashion brands are seeking the permanent closure of the factory due to pollution concerns, highlighting a growing readiness in Vietnam to campaign over environmental issues.
Hundreds of people from Hai Duong, 50 km (30 miles) east of Hanoi, have kept watch in shifts day and night since April to stop work at the Pacific Crystal Textiles mill, operated by Hong Kong-based Pacific Textiles.
Among those affected by the stoppage is Japanese clothing giant UNIQLO.
The blockade marks another challenge to the communist state’s authority stemming from industrial pollution at a time when Vietnam is seeking more foreign investors to maintain one of Southeast Asia’s highest growth rates.
A toxic spill from a Taiwaneserun steel mill in central Vietnam last year sparked unprecedented protests.
The factory in Hai Duong opened in 2015 as a venture between Pacific Textiles Holdings Ltd and garment maker Crystal Group.
Initial investment in the plant was reported at the time to be least US$180 million.
Villagers said they started to notice a bad smell last year.
“It was an unbearably rotten, foul, pungent smell,” said 60-year- old war veteran Vu Dinh Vinh. It got worse at night.
Whenheandothers investigated, he said, they found the smell came from water discharged from the factory.
The company was fined 672 million dong ( US$ 30,000) for that December spill, according to a statement on the Hai Duong authority’s website in February.
Water was found to have breached limits for acidity and alkalinity balance, colour, total suspended sol ids, chemical oxygen demand and biochemical oxygen demand.
But villagers said they were still concerned, accusing the factory of continued pollution and setting up their blockade on April 12.
When a delegation from the local authority visited on Wednesday to give the villagers a three- day deadline to move, they said they were not going anywhere.
“We want to expel the factory and never let it produce again,” said 70-year- old Bui Van Nguyet.
Pacific Textiles said there had been only one discharge of waste water, on Dec. 24, 2016, and that it had not reached the nearby river. Villagers were wrong to say pollution had continued, it said. — Reuters