Vietnam Soil Bank: Cà Mau, soil bank initiative

In 2018, Cà Mau Province in the Mekong Delta announced a soil bank to collect mud dredged from shrimp ponds, canals and rivers and reuse it as construction fill, as an alternative to scarce river sand. Reporting at the time linked it to resettlement housing and coastal embankment works needing an estimated 600,000 m3 of fill (Viet Nam News, 2018).

The plan was for an 11-hectare facility in Cai Nuoc District, then estimated at about VND 20 billion, where collected mud would be conditioned with additives for leveling and embankment fill; the additives were still being researched at the time (Viet Nam News, 2018).

The rationale was that Cà Mau has about 290,000 hectares of aquaculture land where accumulated mud is periodically removed and often pumped into rivers, adding to siltation. Diverting it to a controlled on-land store was expected to reduce repeated dredging of waterways and supply fill (Viet Nam News, 2018).

The model was reported to draw on Dutch sediment reuse practice, with local scientists testing sediment characteristics (Viet Nam News, 2018).

In April 2026, Tuổi Trẻ reported that the facility, with total investment of more than VND 26.6 billion, had been unable to operate for eight years, citing insufficient material supply and an unclear legal framework (Tuổi Trẻ, 2026). A provincial official's 2018 forecast of around EUR 3 million a year (Viet Nam News, 2018) was a forecast, not realized earnings.