National report focuses on craft village environment

      Many craft villages were seriously polluted, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE)’s five-year master report on the environment, which includes the 2008 National Environmental Report on Vietnam’s Craft Village Environment.
It provides an overview of the villages’ development and actions to deal with pollution.
Dividing craft villages into six main groups, the report said they all faced serious threats from water, solid waste and air pollution.
Uncollected solid waster was common to most villages, where it was dumped directly into the environment.
Almost half of the 52 surveyed villages have polluted water, which comes from villages with food processing, animal husbandry and slaughtering and those that do paper and metal recycling and cloth weaving and dying.
Air pollution from stone and other construction materials production was easily found in pottery villages.
The environment level in most of the villages was below permitted standards and workers were confronted with the threat of pollution. The report said 95 percent worked with dust, 85.9 percent with heat problems and nearly 60 percent with dangerous chemicals.