In the cities, there is trash collection. Anywhere outside of the cities, it is dumped just outside of the commune (most of them have a road in and a road out, so there is two heaps). Usually smoldering. If you go to remote areas, you find trash heaps in the middle of nowhere.

It really has nothing to do with money since it is a communist country. The government could decide to allocate resources (ie: people) towards dealing with the mess. That's effectively what they do in the cities.

In Saigon, I lived on Truong Sa in a 5th floor apartment. This street is along a river running through the middle of the city. Every day, there was several boats that would go up and down collecting the trash that people would dump into the river. All day long, I could watch people just stop their bike, get off, walk over to the river and dump their trash into it. The lazy ones would just dump their trash on the street or in the gutters, which tend to back up during rains and cause more flooding.

> All day long, I could watch people just stop their bike, get off, walk over to the river and dump their trash into it

oh dear, thats so gross

In their mind, they know someone else will come along and pick it out. Despite there being plenty of trash cans all along the walkway. Saigon is full of waterways and they are all full of insane amounts of trash. https://imgur.com/ZSwfRPt and https://imgur.com/nhpfqQe

Picture of some random beach somewhere... whole entire coastline is trash and Vietnam is shaped like and the size of California... https://imgur.com/fp6D7Ca

When I went to the world heritage site, Ha Long Bay, I went out in a kayak and picked up a whole bag of trash. I didn't even need to take a bag with me because I just found plenty floating around to use.

This is also a country that still eats dogs (and cats) and really anything that moves. You won't ever get them to stop making waste. https://imgur.com/ItvSF6T