Local Organizers of the SPOGOMI World Championships Vietnam Qualifiers Report on the Garbage Situation in Vietnam

I was born here in Ho Chi Minh City, and there is a very beautiful green park near my parents’ house that I have frequented since childhood. It is an important place that I visit whenever I am at a turning point in my life, and that is why I want to keep it clean, so I started picking up trash every time I go to the park. The park and my heart are one and the same. If the park is clean, my heart is also clear. Thanks to this, it has become completely natural for me to engage in cleanup activities. I often study Japanese there, too.

As I talked with Japanese people who came to Vietnam, I wanted to speak more fluently. I think that Japanese people are the most environmentally conscious people in the world. I actually love soccer, and I woke up early in the morning to watch almost every game of the World Cup, and the sight of Japanese supporters picking up trash after the games became a hot topic in Vietnam. I wanted to study environmental issues in relation to Japan, so I majored in Japanese at university. Incidentally, I am now in my third year and am writing a thesis on the theme of “SPOGOMI” for graduation. After graduation, I would like to go to graduate school in Germany, where environmental measures are as advanced as in Japan, to study the relationship between tourism and the SDGs, etc.

There are many problems that need to be addressed, including the problem of overflowing landfills, but on the citizen level, for example, there is a complete lack of garbage separation. Except for high-end apartments, all garbage, including burnable and non-burnable garbage, and resources such as plastic bottles, are all lumped together and disposed of as garbage. There are many reasons for this, but I feel that the main reason is that strict rules are not in place. No one obeys the rules because there are no fines for breaking them. For example, Vietnam is a motorcycle society, and it is common for parents to litter milk from their babies while they are riding their motorcycles. Since it has been less than 50 years since the end of the war, we need to think about how to educate citizens about the environment in the process of future economic growth. In that sense, it is very important that young people were able to learn about sorting trash voluntarily through SPOGOMI.

In fact, until we started recruiting participants, we honestly did not expect so many people to participate. Moreover, most of the participants are young. Of course, this may be due to the fact that tickets to Japan are at stake, but it may also be due to the rapidly growing interest of Vietnamese people in the environment. I believe that not only Vietnamese but people all over the world will be united in environmental measures through the SPOGOMI World Cup, just like in soccer, so that a rich global environment will be handed down to the next generation. I will not be going to Tokyo this time because I am not a participant, but I would definitely like to visit the clean city of Tokyo sometime in the future. Until then, I will continue to pick up trash and study hard!