The escalating cost of waste disposal her explains the rise of "waste tourism", writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
It's called waste tourism and it's a dirty business. That's been pretty clear since the Basel Convention was signed in 1987 with the aim of preventing unscrupulous companies in the EU and US using countries in west Africa as convenient dumps for hazardous waste.
Ireland's involvement in this sort of illicit waste trade was exposed recently by the seizure of hundreds of tonnes of illegal recycling waste, all originating here, at the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam. It was bound for China and India, but has been sent back to Ireland.
The EU's "proximity principle" attempts to ensure that all categories of waste are recycled, treated or otherwise disposed of as close as possible to where it originated. That was Indaver Ireland's main argument for its hazardous waste incinerator at Ringaskiddy in Cork Harbour.
The fact that waste from 13 counties in the Republic ended up being dumped illegally in Northern Ireland is merely a reflection of market forces - principally the enormous disparity in disposal costs on either side of the Border, which provide a major incentive for such waste tourism.
There has long been good reason to believe that some of our waste was missing. Six years ago, of the 2.3 million tonnes of waste then being generated in the Dublin area, a staggering one million tonnes could not be accounted for by the draft regional waste management plan.
For years, a blind eye was turned to this spate of illegal dumping, which included not just rubble from construction sites in the capital, but also hazardous clinical waste from some major hospitals - much of it ending up in disused quarries and other sites in Co Wicklow.
A belated crackdown by Wicklow County Council has certainly yielded results. Apart from prosecutions, the culprits will have to bear the full costs of remediation - in some cases running into millions of euro - and that will more than offset the profits they made from dumping the waste.
Any notion that the illegal dumps might be legitimised is seen by experts as implausible, as none meets the criteria for highly engineered landfills. There is no impermeable layer to prevent leachate from these dumps polluting goundwater and surface waters in Co Wicklow.
Cross-Border waste tourism has clearly been incentivised by the escalating cost of licensed landfills in the Republic, where charges exceed €200 per tonne, compared to the equivalent of €50 per tonne in the North. The high charges here reflect the scarcity of landfill capacity as well as the adoption of much higher environmental standards - as high as Denmark or Germany, according to Mr P.J. Rudden of MCOS consultants, who compiled several regional waste management plans.
It is shocking that at least 500,000 tonnes of waste are illegally dumped each year, some 10 per cent of the total volume of commercial, domestic and construction waste. And the profits to be made by those involved are very substantial, running to €40 million and possibly as much as €100 million.
Mr Rudden believes that vigorous enforcement is the only way to stop illegal dumping. In this context, the audit being carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency should at least establish the scale of the problem so it can be tackled more effectively.
The courts have a role in this, and it is obvious from the lenient fines imposed on errant waste companies that several District Court judges need a crash course on the problem of illegal dumping, particularly in terms of polluting water supplies and putting public health at serious risk.
Mr Rudden believes the cost of legal waste disposal in the Republic should come down as additional landfills become available and we move towards a more developed waste management regime.