People should recycle. I see no reason to not do so. In Vietnam there is a ton of recycling for profit that goes on all over the place and this is sadly, mostly accomplished because of poverty. Vietnam does quite well on recycling so good for them! They also have one of the worst pollution situations in the entire world because the waste management and mentality of the population as far as disposal or simply an attitude towards littering is very bad. When they installed this "go green" project in this city I got a little bit irked because I noticed right away that it was a farce and the only place it existed in the city was in the tourist areas. This was all a show to put on for the visitors to try to convince them that something Vietnam is known for - being bad polluters - was a topic that I believe they were trying to convince visitors that they were attempting to tackle.
This project hasn't really accomplished anything but yet they stick to it.
You can always tell which tourist area isn't very popular with actual tourists by the state of the recycling installations that were put in.
As you can see the tops are missing from the bins because for some reason, the city felt compelled to create lock-boxes for the recycling bins even though it is well-known that the poorest people in the region frequently dig through regular trash cans in order to locate things to sell for a tiny bit of money each day. By putting them in lock-boxes, the people who need this money the most all of a sudden saw their food money supply cut off in the region. When I started to see these things with the tops missing I laughed and also had a SMH moment because of course this was always going to happen.
There is also the situation of the fact that they built the bin out of substandard materials and have had to replace them once already.
This is the first round of recycling bins that is located directly next to the one in the first picture. It is nearly completely useless and I can't even imagine a good reason for why it is still located here. Why not just take away the old one when installing the new one?
Then there is the question of the sitting booths they put up at around the same time that they put in the recycling bins, normally located in the same place.
I hated these things from the first day they installed them. For starters, they are made entirely of plastic, which we all know is one of the worst pollutants on the planet, especially for a country that has a very poor waste-management program. I suppose they were made of this because there was no reason for people to steal them, but at the same time the planter boxes on the back of all of them were almost immediately turned into trash cans themselves and the very few that they actually installed plants into were never tended to and everything in them died. I don't know how much of a botanist you are but plants, especially newly planted plants, tend to need regular watering, which nobody did.
Now these things are located all over the tourist areas and they just look like hell. The city would have been a lot better off if they had just done nothing. Combine this with the fact that these "go green" installations do not exist outside of tourist areas at all and you have a failed project that the city (perhaps the country) needs to admit was a waste of resources and just get them out of here. I like that the country is attempting to do something, but this is not at all addressing the wasteful problem in this country, it is making it worse.
I think I know how you could get these removed: You could make some stickers that point out that these things are made of non recyclable materials and that they only exist in tourist areas pointing out the fallacy of the government. I bet they would be removed almost immediately if someone were to do that. It isn't going to be me though because I know how little amusement the government gets out of criticism here and I do not wish to get deported :)