In the early morning light of Hanoi, as the city’s motorbikes roar to life and begin to crowd the streets, you might spot women pedaling bicycles slowly through the quiet streets. Their bikes creak under immense bundles of plastic waste — water bottles, food containers, detergent jugs, balanced in implausibly high towers, each destined for reuse rather than landfill.
For all its difficulty and even its danger, Ms Nguyen Thi Lanh finds dignity and reward in it. “I don’t want people to misunderstand or view this as a bad job,” she says. “It’s a job that helps keep the environment clean and green.”
One of the nearly 10,000 women collecting plastics for recycling in Hanoi is Ms Nguyen Thi Kenh, 74, who has worked as an informal waste collector for more than two decades. Another is Ms Nguyen Thi Lanh, 59, a seasonal migrant who returns from Hanoi to her village each year with the money she has earned from collecting plastic to support her children and grandchildren.
The conditions women like Ms Nguyen Thi Kenh and Ms Nguyen Thi Lanh work under are often harsh. “This kind of work takes a toll on the body,” says Ms Nguyen Thi Lanh. “First, it physically wears us out. Second, we’re exposed to heavy environmental pollution,” she says. “So overall, our health has suffered a lot because of it.”
These women are among Viet Nam’s unsung environmental stewards. They are part of an invisible army of informal or freelance workers, most of them older rural women, who collect and sort an estimated 60% of the country’s recyclable plastic. Their stories are at the heart of a new short documentary called Invisible Warriors: The Force Behind Viet Nam’s Plastic Action. The film highlights how local action — grounded in dignity, resilience, and community — is transforming Viet Nam’s response to the global plastic pollution crisis.
“This job is very important,” says Ms Nguyen Thi Kenh. “We collect recyclables, helping the environment stay green and clean. This benefits the country, making it more beautiful,” she says, adding that “by sorting different waste materials, we help make recycling and environmental efforts more effective every day.”
An informal waste collector cycles through Hanoi.Image: Javier Gesto, Nicolas Siegenthaler
The gendered burden of waste work
The world produces over 400 million tons of plastic waste annually, and much of it ends up clogging rivers, seas, and ecosystems — or choking landfills in lower-income countries. Viet Nam, one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing economies, has become a hotspot of plastic consumption. Viet Nam accounts for 1.8 million tonnes annually, and roughly 27% of that is recycled. But the country is also emerging as a potential leader in tackling the problem.
Behind nearly 90% of all plastic recycled in Viet Nam is someone like Ms Nguyen Thi Kenh or Ms Nguyen Thi Lanh, pushing a heavy cart through narrow alleyways, picking through household waste, often without gloves or other protective gear.
Women aged 40 to 70 dominate Viet Nam’s informal plastic value chain. Many are, like Ms Nguyen Thi Lanh, seasonal migrants from rural provinces. They take on this work because it offers flexible hours, allowing them to juggle domestic duties, and requires little capital to start.
They face not only physical strain and exposure to pollutants but also a high risk from frequent fires, social stigma, and growing threats from increasingly mechanized, male-dominated parts of the waste industry. Few have health insurance.
It’s also the case that none have formal labour protections. But it’s complicated: not all workers in the frontline of Viet Nam’s plastic recycling want the sector to be formalized. Ms Dang Nguyet Anh, manager of Viet Nam’s National Plastic Action Partnership (NPAP), says that surveys of informal workers show reluctance from many.
“The feedback from them is that many of them don’t want to be formalized, because it is seasonal work, a part-time job. And they feel free to do it, not under much pressure of eight-hour working hours every day,” she says.
It’s a system that relies on their labour, but these women are not always accorded the recognition they deserve. But that is beginning to change, says Mr. Hoang Duc Vuong, Chairman of VietCycle, a local company working to improve conditions for informal waste workers.
“Over the past few years, we’ve made a major shift in how this work is perceived,” says Mr. Hoang Duc Vuong. “In the past, these individuals were labeled as ‘scrap collectors’ or ‘junk dealers’. We’ve now redefined them with a new term: ‘Green Warriors’ — a title that reflects the essential work they do in waste collection across Viet Nam.”
From grassroots to governance
Founded five years ago, VietCycle works at the intersection of advocacy, community support, and public education. The organization provides protective gear and bicycles, trains women in fire safety and financial management, and helps connect them to social services. It also runs campaigns encouraging households to pre-sort waste, improving recovery rates and reducing contamination.
But perhaps most importantly, VietCycle is elevating the status of informal waste workers — driving a shift in societal attitude so that they are increasingly seen not as trash pickers, but as environmental professionals. Women like Ms Nguyen Thi Kenh and Ms Nguyen Thi Lanh are now “considered the backbone in the solid waste management in the country”, says Ms Dang Nguyet Anh. “They are a very unique workforce in Viet Nam.”
For VietCycle, building the ‘Green Warrior’ network hasn’t been easy. One of the very first partners supporting VietCycle has been the packaged goods company Unilever. Through their collaboration ‘The Plastic Reborn’, Unilever has provided 3,000 informal waste workers with protective gear, uniforms and other monthly necessities since 2021.
The workers were also provided with specialist training on waste segregation, and selected informal waste collectors were supplied with health insurance.
Through these types of circular economy projects, Unilever is meeting its Fair Circularity Initiative (FCI) commitments. The FCI is driving initiatives like this that aim to improve working conditions for waste pickers by engaging partners throughout the recycling value chain to promote the integration of the informal waste sector into formal value chains. Along with this, the FCI seeks to engage with waste picker industry organizations to better understand the needs of waste pickers and the challenges they face in their localities so that initiatives can be adapted accordingly.
VietCycle’s local effort dovetails with major national reforms. In 2020, Viet Nam passed a landmark Environmental Protection Law, making waste separation at source mandatory and laying the groundwork for extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes. The country has also rolled out a National Action Plan on Marine Plastic Waste Management, aiming to reduce plastic leakage into the ocean by 75% by 2030.
VietCycle is a member of the Viet Nam National Plastic Action Partnership (NPAP), which advances the country’s circular economy goals through multi-stakeholder collaboration. Within NPAP’s Gender Equality and Social Inclusion taskforce, VietCycle helps ensure that the perspectives of informal workers inform gender-responsive, inclusive policymaking on plastic pollution.
“The Viet Nam NPAP is currently one of the few initiatives capable of establishing an effective coordination mechanism with more than 200 partners, connecting government agencies, the business sector, international organisations and the community of experts in environment, circular economy and plastic waste management,” says Mr Vu Duc Dam Quang, Deputy Director General of the International Cooperation Department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment and now Vice-Chair of Viet Nam NPAP.
“After five years of effort, more than 570 innovative solutions have been supported and more than 160 plastic waste reduction initiatives have been recorded, notably providing support to nearly 7,000 informal female waste collectors,” said Mr Vu Duc Dam Quang.
The NPAP Viet Nam is a local chapter of the World Economic Forum’s Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP). It’s the world’s largest initiative tackling plastic pollution, with 25 national partnerships representing 1.5 billion people. GPAP drives systemic change across the plastics value chain, supporting countries in their transition to circular economies.
Through its Inclusive Plastic Action Programme – in partnership with the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs – GPAP supported 24 organizations like VietCycle in 2024, building skills, improving livelihoods, and advancing inclusive solutions tailored to the informal economy. To date, the programme has reached over 20,000 informal waste workers worldwide.
In August 2025, GPAP will announce the 10 organizations selected for its next round of support.
This is not just theory — it’s practice. Behind every policy is a person. Plastic pollution is a planetary crisis. But the solutions, as Viet Nam’s waste warriors show us, begin with human hands — sorting, lifting, and believing that change is possible.
(The piece was originally published on the World Economic Forum website)
