Overtourism is causing this city to suffocate in trash. These eco-pioneers are trying to change that

The hot dogs came with chilli sauce and pots of mustard. So far, so normal for an evening at a tap room garden busy with drinkers. So, what’s unusual? All my condiments are made from beer vinegar, creating tangy seasonings repurposed from brewery by-products. At Hoi An’s 7 Bridges Brewery, almost nothing goes down the drain.

Spent grain, another by-product from the brewing process, goes into making pizza dough and sourdough. And in full circle, spare pizza dough makes its way into Upcycle, one of their seasonal pale ales. Even the tap room’s straws are locally made from sugarcane. “All these leftovers should be part of every business’ decision making,” the brewery’s creative director Travis Hodges tells me. 

7 Bridges is on a mission to become a zero waste brewery. Here, beer waste is collected three ways: From a soured keg; the lees (yeast and hop sedimentation) in brewing tanks; and the draining of the overpour when beer taps are drawn each morning.

Waste, in general, is of urgent concern in Hoi An, a city in central Vietnam that’s bulging with tourists. Often hailed as one of the world’s most popular travel destinations, Hoi An ranked sixth best city in 2025 by Travel+Leisure Magazine, and the world’s cheapest destination in 2024 by the UK Post Office. 

Over 25 years, visitor numbers have rocketed. In 1999, 202,000 visitors arrived in the city of 100,000 people; by 2024 visitors soared to a staggering 4.43 million, while the local population remained at roughly 120,000. 

It’s not hard to see why the city is a hot spot. Historic Hoi An is very alluring. UNESCO-protected ochre-hued buildings with deeply sloping roofs, Chinese assembly halls, timber-framed merchant houses, and dozens of restaurants, bars, cafés and tailor shops line lantern-decorated streets. It nudges up close to the Thu Bon River where traditional flat-bottom sampan boats ferry visitors up and down the river. The streets smell of coffee, jasmine and, sometimes, river water from the occasional flood.

From October to April during Vietnam’s peak travel season, 50,000 to 100,000 plastic straws a month are scooped up by the Not Just Plastic team.

But along with the global gongs come some unpalatable truths. Vietnam throws more than eight million tons of usable food away each year. In Hoi An, daily food waste numbers 100 tons, about the weight of a blue whale. Plastic rubbish is another sorry tale. Over three million tons of plastic waste—equivalent to two million cars—is dumped, not even always in landfill, across the country every year, says the World Bank. 

At least 10 percent of the plastic leaks into waterways, making Vietnam one of the world’s top five plastic polluters of our oceans. In 2010, it was estimated that 177 million plastic items would clog Vietnam’s coral reefs and mangroves by 2025. And to make it worse, more than 60 percent of the plastics are single use (SUPs). 

As I tuck into my hotdogs, I’m perched on a seat built from coffee grounds. It was made by  Not Just Plastic (NJP), the brainchild of a Danish-Vietnamese team. NJP pivoted from ‘coffee waste’ seating to recycling the city’s SUPs when the team began picking up plastic waste from cafés and restaurants. From their first partner in 2023, NJP now collaborates with 130, including local schools. 

From October to April during Vietnam’s peak travel season, 50,000 to 100,000 plastic straws a month are scooped up by the team. Straws and plastic cutlery are shredded, melted down and molded into sunglasses; I see the frames being sold across town. For every NJP product sold, a dollar is donated to help fund clean water and solar power. 

Is NJP in the business of preventing plastic waste, too? I ask founder Frantz Byrch Pedersen at NJP’s warehouse north of Hoi An’s old town. “I sell rice straws which are normally four to five times more expensive than a plastic straw, but I sell them at the same price as a paper straw,” he tells me.

The fight against SUPs unites locals, too. Long Nguyen remembers his childhood days of swimming with friends in the river facing his home near Hanoi— until factory discharge killed fish and local livelihoods. 

He fell in love with Hoi An’s beautiful Thu Bon river on vacation in 2013 and moved to the city in 2014. But then he noticed plastic choking the mangroves and catching in the palm trees. In 2015, he began to pick up plastic while taking travelers on kayaking tours of Hoi An. He now takes out 30 people every Saturday morning for a Hoi An clean up. 

In the beginning, kayakers collected two tons of rubbish, including a lot of SUP bottles.  Now it’s about 100 to 300 kilograms—less bottles but more plastic cups and bags, he says.

“My volunteers can’t clean all the river, but we have changed the mind of local people,” he says. It’s also influenced the local government: Plastic lanterns that drifted downstream during Hoi An’s festivities have been replaced with paper.

“We still need to educate people and the young people to stop using single-use plastic,” Long explains. “And hopefully, in the future, we can use new biodegradable plastic like Japan.”

North of the river is a pioneering plastic-free zone. Silk Sense Hoi An River Resort is the first ‘zero plastic’ hotel in the country. As I swim in its pool—treated with Ozone and mineral salts, not chlorine—I celebrate the resort’s quiet determination to go fully green. 

Silk Sense’s initiatives include providing in-room amenities made from bamboo and biodegradable materials, air-conditioning heat waste is captured and used to heat water in the bathrooms (known as ‘waste heat recovery’), and no deliveries made to the hotel are packed in plastic. 

When Booking.com labeled the resort a ‘Sustainable Destination’ last year and added the Travelife gold certificate—an internationally recognized, and regularly audited system, issued by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council—reservations rose by 30 per cent, according to manager Vien Ha. 

Handling food waste is a core commitment too, and across the street a machine chomps 100 percent of the hotel’s food waste into compost that is then used in the hotel’s vegetable garden.

“We’ve asked the government for a favorable tax policy for certified green businesses, or we establish a green tourism fund which nurtures young businesses… There must be clear incentives; the benefits will definitely change attitudes.”

- Van Ba Son, Da Nang City’s Deputy Director of Culture, Sport and

Dedication to reducing food waste also underpins the Thanh Dong organic farm cooperative set up alongside a coiling tributary of the Thu Bon river. While farmer Le Nhuong pokes his manure pile, he tells me that 10,000 kilograms a year of some 300 herbs and vegetables, like aubergine, winter melon and sweet potato, are destined for local markets, schools and The Field Restaurant—my lunch destination, set amid paddy fields west of the farm.

A coracle boat (resin-coated bamboo basket boat) delivers me to the restaurant where I help prepare my lunch using the farm produce. A light moringa salad with shrimp, and a very moreish crispy aubergine roll stuffed with pork are both on the menu. 

The Field Restaurant is owned by Emic Hospitality, and its general manager Thuy Nguyen Thi Thanh joins me at my table. She tells me that the food waste from the restaurant is recycled to reduce daily waste; they repurpose organic waste to create chemical-free dishwashing liquid; no SUPs are used anywhere on-site; the restaurant supports 35 local rice farming families, and Emic Hospitality works to negotiate higher prices for their organic rice at local markets. Beyond that, they work with the SK2 Fund, a family-run foundation, to train young people in farming—an urgent need when Thanh Dong’s youngest farmer is 65.

Across the river, at Cam Kim Island, I meet another local dedicated to greening Hoi An. Hanh Vu is one of the city’s top eco consultants and heads up the Green Youth Collective (GYC) and REED, two grassroots organizations dedicated to regenerative living. I meet her at the Hoi An Eco Hub, a community-led environmental center surrounded by a collective composting outfit. 

REED is leading the zero-waste movement for the tourism sector, working with tourism businesses, operators, hotels and restaurants to make tangible shifts towards reducing plastic. Some of these tourism initiatives include projects like  Soap for Hope, which since 2018 has seen one tonne of leftover hotel soap transformed and delivered to children centers and medical posts in remote villages.

“If travelers are handed the right tools and meet the right people with real stories, they will see their own lives in different ways,” says Vu. “Once travelers are aware about issues, they can influence local businesses on eco-friendly approaches.”

And it’s not only local eco-pioneers trying to implement effective change. In July this year, Hoi An was subsumed into the country’s largest new province, Da Nang City, and now falls under the jurisdiction of the larger province’s ‘green criteria’ for businesses. According to Van Ba Son, Da Nang City’s Deputy Director of Culture, Sport and Tourism, this includes policies for community based tourism such as reusing old building materials where possible, using compost from organic waste as natural fertilizer and raising 25 per cent of electricity from solar power. 

The Hoi An historic quarter is closed to petrol-fuelled motor traffic twice a day to preserve the city’s heritage and travelers can now book electric shuttles around the city. He cites, too, the success of banning plastic bags on the Cham Islands, just 13 miles (five kilometers) off the coast of Hoi An. That’s a blueprint for the whole province, he says, but he recognizes local officials need to step up.

“We’ve asked the government for a favorable tax policy for certified green businesses,” he says, citing Thailand and Indonesia as examples. “Or we establish a green tourism fund which nurtures young businesses… There must be clear incentives; the benefits will definitely change attitudes.”

At a recent tourism workshop, Silk Sense Resort’s Ms Vien shared the good news about the resort’s boost in reservations in a bid to convince local hoteliers to board the zero-plastic train.

“We want to do something good,” she told me, as we walked under passion fruit vines in the resort’s vegetable garden. “And if we are getting better, so Hoi An is getting better [at sustainability].”

As I recall my trip to NJP’s warehouse stuffed with plastic cups and Cam Kim Island’s thriving eco hub, it’s heartening to know that there’s a green wave happening here in Hoi An that’s led by a small, but passionate, band of eco-pioneers. And of everything I’ve experienced in the city, I’d like to raise a 7 Bridges Brewery pint to that!

The writer traveled to Vietnam with Inside Asia

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