CCTV is to be used to catch illegal dumpers in Dublin city for the first time in almost a decade, but only if they dump their waste from a car.
Dublin City Council plans to install CCTV cameras on three streets in the north inner city: Belvedere Place, Sherrard Street Lower and Summer Street North.
These streets, off the North Circular Road close to Mountjoy Square, are in Dublin’s worst litter black spot. They are also, however, in areas with the lowest concentrations of car ownership, not only in Dublin but in the entire State.
Bernie Lillis, the council official heading up the initiative, said the new CCTV legislation meant it would be “very, very difficult” to capture dumpers on camera and pursue prosecutions, particularly on the three streets selected.
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“We will not be able to use any footage of people who are walking about the street with a bag in their hand who are dumping,” she said. “We are only able to use the registration numbers of vehicles.”
In 2014 the council began installing CCTV at litter black spots, mostly in the north inner city, as part of a crackdown on illegal dumping. It subsequently erected a poster featuring 12 dumpers, with their faces blurred.
However, the move aroused the attention of the Data Protection Commission, which questioned the proportionality of the scheme and the rights to privacy of the dumpers.
The commission in 2018 undertook an investigation of CCTV use by local authorities nationally and concluded existing litter pollution and waste management law did not provide for using CCTV to identify dumpers.
New legislation, the Circular Economy and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2022, amended the Litter Pollution Acts to allow CCTV use, and the council has been working for the past two years with various State agencies to develop a new scheme.
This is likely to be implemented in the three pilot streets early next year. However, Ms Lillis said, it “is not the silver bullet” that will clean up dirty Dublin.
“Certainly on those three streets in the north inner city ... it will be a problem trying to get evidence, because I don’t know how many vehicles are dumping there.”
The council cannot use footage of people walking on the street, even if they dump rubbish.
“We have no entitlement to invade people’s privacy so we need to delete that footage unless we see a vehicle entering that street and the occupier – the driver or the passenger – carrying out illegal dumping.”
Satisfying the data protection regulations had been a “monumental task”, Ms Lillis said. “We were overwhelmed when we saw the amount of documentation required.”
She had also been “shocked” to discover the council could not cross-reference any information from CCTV with the new “reverse register” it is compiling. The council requires waste companies to furnish details of households with collection contracts so it can compile a register of residents not paying for their waste to be collected.
“If we see someone coming out of a house with a bag and they are dumping, we cannot cross-reference that data with the reverse register, so that puts a big hindrance on it. We are very limited.”
Following the north inner city pilot, the council hopes to extend CCTV to bottle and textile banks where there is a high level of illegal dumping, before considering some suburban areas for the scheme.
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