In Vietnam’s villages, cancer stalks recyclers who do ‘extremely dirty’ job

Crouched between mountains of discarded plastic, Lanh strips the labels off bottles of Coke, Evian and local Vietnamese tea drinks so they can be melted into tiny pellets for reuse. More waste arrives daily, piling up like technicolour snowdrifts along the roads and rivers of Xa Cau, one of hundreds of “craft” recycling villages encircling Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, where waste is sorted, shredded and melted. The villages present a paradox: they enable reuse of some of the 1.8 million tonnes of...