After carrying out several surveys on the issue of waste and plastics pollution in Vietnam, I became accustomed to looking under bridges where waste often accumulated. One day, my eye was caught by plastic bags floating under a busy road near Quy Nhon, a coastal town in the centre of the country. When I walked down under the bridge, I was not expecting to meet a mother and her daughter stooped down, knee-deep in water, busy rinsing clear plastic bags in the water of the river. In order to complement their family’s farming income, these women recover plastic bags that once contained seafood, wash them in the river to rid them of their smell and sell them on to one of the plastic recycling factories that recently opened in the region.
