“Glass half full:  Promoting community initiatives to develop Ngu My Thanh as a no plastic waste village” is a collection of sharing, discussions and practices by Ngu My Thanh villagers in developing a no plastic waste village model.

The publication has been produced as part of the Project “Empowering Women to Build a Strong and Sustainable Village” which was implemented from April 2019 to February 2020.  The Project was funded by Australian Volunteers International (AVI) and implemented by the Center for Knowledge Co-creation and Development Research (CKC).

This publication presents messages about the significance of Tam Giang Lagoon environment and environmental protection measures, and introduces asset-based community development (ABCD) approaches to develop initiatives for building strong and sustainable communities. This publication also collected and illustrated single-use reduction initiatives by local village women such as ‘Using banana leaves instead of plastic bags’, ‘Turning waste into flowers’, ‘Community-based tourism without plastic waste’, and a local campaign to clean up the lagoon habitat. The initiatives help to raise public awareness and change local habits, and especially emphasise the role of women in reducing plastic waste in their own home, as well as their neighborhood and the village. Through this publication, CKC and the authors hope that the knowledge and experience shared during the seminars and the lessons learned from the community initiatives will be applied in different ways in different places.

“What we saw at Ngu My Thanh is part of a bigger movement. Over the last few years Vietnam and the global community has become much more aware of the damage that single use plastics are doing to the world. This damage – especially to the marine environment – has become much more apparent as we see pictures of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and remote island beaches littered by plastic waste, and as we hear that there are five bags full of plastic for every foot of coastline and that plastic waste kills 100,000 marine mammals every year. Slowly but gradually the countries of the world – and their provinces like Thua Thien Hue, and their villages like Ngu My Thanh – are taking action to slow down and reverse what we have been doing without thinking for so many decades.” Philip Thomas – CKC Business Mentor and a volunteer of the Australian Volunteers Program.