Seeds planted over the past decade by communities in Vietnam have now borne fruit: the nation’s leadership has announced the intent to do something about the country’s plastic trash problem.

On June 9, Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc launched a campaign to fight plastic pollution, pledging to ban single-use plastic nationwide by 2025. With Phúc’s pronouncement, Vietnam places itself alongside the European Union, India, and Canada in declaring a vision for a world without plastic pollution.

To realize this commitment, Vietnam’s environment ministry has been developing a national plan on plastic waste, which we expect Prime Minister Phúc to approve in the coming months. With these wheels now in motion, Vietnam’s civil society will seek to encourage strong lawmaking that will force the plastics industry to make fundamental changes.