Plastic bag bans have become so ordinary that it is hard to remember when they started. In most of the world they belong to the last decade, and in many places they are still being argued over. On a group of eight islands off the coast of Quảng Nam they have done without them since 2009.
This is not a brochure fact. It is the practical consequence of a very specific situation: a small, closed territory with few people and an economy that depends directly on the water staying clean.
01 Eight islands and three thousand people
The archipelago is visible from the beach at Hội An on clear days: a mountainous silhouette on the horizon, some twenty kilometres out. It is made up of eight islets. The big one, Hòn Lao, covers 1,317 hectares; the other seven are Hòn Dài, Hòn Khô mẹ, Hòn Khô con, Hòn Lá, Hòn Tai and Hòn Ông.
The inhabited surface adds up to 15 square kilometres and around 3,000 people live on it, spread across a few coastal settlements. The full reserve, counting the sea, covers 5,000 hectares.
That scale is the key to everything that follows. Three thousand people on eight islands is a community where everyone knows where the rubbish comes from and where it goes, and where a collective decision can be enforced without an enormous administrative apparatus.
02 What happened in 2009
On 26 May 2009 UNESCO declared the area formed by Cù Lao Chàm and Hội An a Biosphere Reserve. The designation was not entirely new: the marine nature reserve had been established earlier, in October 2003, and the islands already figured among the country's marine protected areas.
What was new is what was done with the designation. That same year the local administration and residents stopped using plastic bags, and a reduce, reuse and recycle programme was set up. The islands present themselves as the first place in Vietnam where that practice took hold.
It is worth placing the date. In 2009 most European countries still had no restrictions at all and the public debate on single-use plastic had not yet begun. Here the decision was taken a decade before it became an international slogan.
03 The other business: nests at four thousand dollars a kilo
The islands' traditional economy is not fishing or tourism, though there is some of both. It is the harvesting of swiftlet nests, birds that nest on the walls of sea caves and build the nest from their own saliva, which solidifies as it dries.
The figures explain why the trade survives. Around 1.4 tonnes of nest a year come off these islands, and the kilo is valued at around 4,000 dollars. It is a product of extremely high value per unit of weight, taken from a handful of specific caves.
The activity has been regulated for centuries. Under the Nguyễn lords it was a monopoly, and today it is carried out under licence. The Thanh Châu trade, in Hội An, appears on the national list of intangible cultural heritage, and the temple dedicated to the guild's ancestors is recognised as a national relic.
04 What is underneath
The other half of the argument is under the water. Inside the reserve there are 165 hectares of coral reef and 500 hectares of underwater meadows, and the inventories record 135 species of coral, 202 of fish, 84 of molluscs and 4 of lobster.
A reef that size is small and fragile, and its condition depends on very elementary things: what arrives from land, what is thrown from boats, how many people tread on it. Floating plastic is not an aesthetic problem in a place like this; it is a survival problem for the resource.
05 Why it worked here
The interesting question is not why bags were banned but why the ban held. And the answer has less to do with ecological awareness than with geography.
An island is a closed system. Everything that comes in has to leave by the same route or stay, and on a territory of fifteen square kilometres there is nowhere to hide rubbish. On the mainland waste disappears from view; on a small island it stays in front of everybody.
Add to that the fact that the main source of income — the nests, the fishing, the visitors — depends on the water being clean. It is not a sacrifice in exchange for nothing: it is an investment with a direct, visible return for the 3,000 people who live there.
06 How to visit
You get there by speedboat from Hội An's harbour in under half an hour, and most people go and come back the same day. There is also accommodation in private homes in the coastal villages, which is the way to see the islands once the day trips have left.
The season matters more here than on the mainland. From September to December the sea off this coast turns rough and crossings are frequently suspended; between February and August the connection is reliable. Reckon with the fact that one bad-weather day can take the plan off the calendar.
And the practical part: if you go, do not take plastic bags with you. It is not a symbolic gesture or a guidebook suggestion. It is the rule of the place since 2009, and it is the reason that patch of sea still has 135 species of coral.
