Bangers, burnt-out wrecks, dumped old cars: well, it's all going to change, asserts Kieran Fagan, looking at plans for our streetscapes.
Think scrap cars and ghastly images of fields of rusting hulks come to mind. Driving through the countryside, you crest the brow of a hill, and below you is rust city, decaying skeletons of old and wrecked cars piled on top of each other, disfiguring the countryside.
"We're going to change all that," says entrepreneur and property developer Tony Gannon. His new 40,000 sq ft car recovery and recycling plant at Turvey Avenue, Donabate, in north Co Dublin, looks like any industrial estate building, clean, modern, unremarkable.
He has invested €4.5 million in the business, which received a licence to operate from Fingal Co Council last week.
Were it not for the sign, which says Gannon's City Recovery and Recycling Services outside, it could be a distribution depot for a paint wholesaler. Not a banger in sight, just Tony's Mercedes saloon and a few staff and customer cars parked outside.
"Here's what happens," he explains. "A car is stolen or crashed or both. We have 10 recovery trucks on the road 24 hours a day, picking up crashed vehicles, and bringing them in. If the guards want to examine a vehicle for evidence, we have a secure forensic bay in which we keep it for them. Then we hold it for the insurance company assessor to have a look at. The beauty of it is that when we are putting 100-120 cars through a week, the assessor can deal with multiple vehicles in one visit, instead of trekking around lots of different garages."
He says he's getting positive reactions from the insurance companies and from motorists who appreciate the streamlined processing of the formalities that go with having a crash, or a car stolen. When the insurance company has signed off, the wrecks go to a depollutant bay where oil and other fluids are recovered for recycling, and the business of salvaging tyres, plastics and metals begins.
What Tony Gannon is doing is getting in ahead of the pack, though his plant focuses on crashed rather than end of life vehicles. An EU Directive on End-of-Life Vehicles was adopted in 2000 and the deadline for putting it into operation was April 2002, which Ireland missed.
According to an EU spokeswoman: "The European Commission has started an infringement procedure against Ireland and five other member states which have failed to transpose the Directive in time, or have not transposed it correctly." This the Department of the Environment admits, but says all will be well next year.
"The delay . . . is primarily due to difficulties encountered in reaching agreement with the relevant sectors on the detailed mechanisms for the operation of the free ELV take-back arrangements required by the Directive, including how such mechanisms will be funded," a spokeswoman in Dublin said this week.
There's the rub. The Directive states that all or most of the cost of the recovery of end of life vehicles should be born by the original manufacturer. It is probably fair to say that the manufacturers and distributors are trying to maximise the "wriggle room" which the Directive allows.
The words "free" and "mechanism" are at odds with each other here.
The EU spokeswoman said: "It is up to the Member States to decide in their legislation whether they want to allocate some of the costs to the waste treatment operator, but the vehicle manufacturers must at least meet 'a significant part' of the cost. For vehicles put on the market before July 1st, 2002, the free take-back scheme will only apply as from January 1st, 2007."
"It is intended to conclude implementation arrangements and to make regulations fully transposing the Directive's provisions later this year, facilitating its full implementation in 2005," the Department of the Environment spokeswoman concludes.
It will be interesting to see which way the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, jumps, if jump is the word for the snail's pace at which his department is moving on this, with implementation running at an admitted three years delay.
As we have no indigenous car manufacturing sector, he might be expected to favour front-loading all the cost on the original selling price. Equally the wholesale and retail trade can be expected to fight against this.
The Directive also sets out to make cars more recyclable at the manufacturing stage. The lead-in period for implementation is extremely long, with minimum targets for reuse, recycling and recovery to be achieved in the long-term (2015).
The directive also sets out to deal with the eyesore aspects of current car scrap/car disposal. Either way, the cost of recycling will be born ultimately by the motorist. And few will argue against the necessity of doing something about the fields of scrap cars.
Disposing of a banger: the legal options
First try the scrap dealer, then your local authority. If you have an old car to trade in, provided it is still driving and the body is reasonably straight, it probably has some value, even though it might not be much. So if the dealer you are buying the replacement from won't give you something for it, try going direct to a scrap dealer.
Many old cars taken as trade-ins are sold on "in the trade", sometimes in bulk, for anything from €50 to €300. So get some money for your banger if you can.
Otherwise contact your local authority if you cannot dispose of it, though the level of assistance you get ranges from advice to action - depending on where you live.
Dublin City Council's car disposal unit disposes of about 60 end-of-life vehicles, which is Eurospeak for scrap cars, each week. "We probably have a more acute problem than most local authorities," says Martin Daly, who runs the highly subsidised car recovery service.
"If someone in our area has an old car they wish to get rid of, they should contact me and I'll send them out the forms to sign, or alternatively the forms are on the website at www.dublincity.ie or they can be e-mailed by contacting martin.daly@dublincity.ie or faxed. Then, usually in a couple of days of getting the paperwork done, and getting payment of €30, I'll have the car taken away to have the oil and hydraulic fluid drained off and the residue crushed and recycled," he says.
But what if someone abandons a car outside a home or business premises in the city council's area? "The resident should contact their local authority," says Mr Daly, "If it is our area, we'll go out, take photographs and try to trace the owner. If it is a newish car, the insurance company may wish to examine it, and we'll allow time for that. But if we are talking about a 12-year-old burnt-out banger, where there is no prospect of an economic repair, we don't hang about. Dublin City Council has powers under the Waste Management Act (1996) to have it taken away for crushing and we get on with it."
People must remember that abandoned bangers are not just unsightly. They can be dangerous, to motorists, to residents. Children can get hurt playing in and around them. They can provide a focus for anti-social behaviour. Mr Daly says his job is to get them off the streets and out of harm's way as quickly as possible.
A quick straw poll of local authorities suggests that, while they remove dangerous and abandoned vehicles, some do not remove old vehicles at the owner's request. Navan Town council, for example, removes dangerous vehicles, and tries to trace owners of abandoned vehicles, but refers owners who ask for assistance to registered scrap dealers.
Dublin City Council vehicle recovery service can be contacted at 01-411 4242. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Co Council, phone 01-205 4817, provides a similar service in its area for €50. There's a complete list of local authorities in the green pages in the Eircom telephone directories.