In 2008, the Company has received the support from the Ministry of Industry and Trade via the Cleaner Production in Industry Component (CPI); and the technical assistance  from Vietnam Cleaner Production Centre in assessing and applying CP solutions.

Before applying CP, Hai Dang has met many environmental problems derived from production process such as air pollution due to fish dust, odor and steam from steam system; water contamination due to floor cleaning, fresh fish off-loading and gathering before processing and quenching process at the boiler. Those environmental problems have directly and negatively affected the working conditions of the employees as well as the environment of the surrounding community.

In the first phase (from December 2008  to June 2009), The Company set up a Cleaner Production Team to assess the whole company. The team had 03 members who are production supervisor of the company and led by Ms. Tran Thi Troi.

The Team has conducted a walk-through assessment on the production line at place. After the assessment and identification of all waste streams, the Team has conducted mass and energy balances for the whole production line. All collected data have been used to analyse and identify Cleaner Production options for each production steps.

Before applying CP, a large amount of fish dust was lost at the milling phase (around 12 tons/year). This is due to the Company had no air suction and wasted fish dust collection system. That is why the air environment at the operation line and surrounding areas were heavily polluted.

The CP team carried out Good housekeeping to reduce the material loss, including: skill training, awareness raising for workers, cover the fish meal storage to avoid powder lift-off during high wind conditions and worker’s movement..

Before applying CP, a large amount of coal was lost due to much steam leaking, poor isulation, and some no-isulation points, vertical and obsolete boiler, old steam consumers (fish steamers). All of those issues affected the production process and led to high thermal consumption.

After the CP team analyzed causes and proposed CP solutions, the Company has implemented the solutions of immediately fixing steam leaking points, isulation of steam pipelines and thermal equipment; boiler cleaning and coal classification before charging into the oven.

In the second phase (from Jan to Nov 2009), the Company has implemented some high-cost solution such as replacing the steamer by a higher efficient one and substitution of the existed boiler by the new horizionnal 3-pass one; building a the dust and odor treatment system by a water-saving absorptive scrubber; construction of a wastewater treatment system and substitution of the current cyclone and old bag filters by a new filter system to avoid dust emissions and product loss.

Particular benefits derived from Cleaner Production are as follows: