Europe is making up for Ireland's failure to address its waste problems. Derek Scally in Berlin outlines the temporary bail-out courtesy of Germany
If you fancy a foreign holiday this year, disguise yourself as a bag of household rubbish and take yourself to the midlands for a most interesting excursion. Two months ago, Longford began an unusual trade with Germany, exporting waste for incineration. But what seems like an ideal solution to the county's waste problems could come under threat in coming years as the German government tightens up its waste legislation.
Longford's waste problems go back nearly a decade after the council closed all the landfills in the county, leaving it dependent on neighbours to take its waste. News spread that Longford was "exporting" its waste to other counties and neighbouring counties soon closed their borders.
Meleadys, the private waste contractor appointed by the county council, began transporting the waste to landfills in Northern Ireland, but that came to an end with new legislation from London banning the importation of foreign waste.
"The Irish scene is dreadful. Everyone wants their rubbish removed, but like mobile phone masts, nobody wants landfills put near them," said Mr Anthony Meleady, managing director.
With prices in existing Irish landfills rising exponentially, he began to look for alternatives abroad. Now Longford waste is some of the best-travelled rubbish in Irish history.
Based on current estimates, more than 15,000 tonnes will be exported this year. The waste is brought to Dublin and 20-tonne vacuum containers are loaded on to a ship bound for Rotterdam. Once there, the waste travels by road to the Weisweiler thermal treatment plant in western Germany.
"We would prefer to see the proximity principle in use and have the waste stay in Ireland," admits Mr Roibeard Ó Ceallaigh, senior executive office for sanitation in Longford County Council.
Meleadys is not the only company exporting Irish waste to Germany. It has an agreement with Dublin operator Cara, which has itself been sending waste for treatment in Germany since 1995. It now exports about 60,000 tonnes annually, from commercial waste and asbestos to contaminated soil which, when thermally treated, can be reused in road construction and industrial land.
Cara's partner in Germany is RWE Energy, one of Europe's largest utilities groups.
RWE is half-owner of the Weisweiler thermal treatment plant, 40 km from the city of Aachen, on the border with the Netherlands and Belgium.
"Waste is a product that we import from Ireland, just like Irish butter," said Mr Ulrich Koch, the plant manager. "This attitude that it is somehow different just because it smells is nonsense." He is happy to accept Irish waste to help make up the shortfall that faces many of Germany's 56 thermal treatment plants.
The shortfall will last until 2005 when waste operators are obliged to treat thermally all waste to make it "biologically inactive" before it is deposited in landfills.
Until the deadline, landfill operators are anxious to fill their sites as quickly as possible with untreated waste. The treated waste they will have to start accepting in 2005 has one-quarter the volume, meaning a certain drop in income.
The new waste-treatment legislation is a sign of how seriously the Germans take their waste - so seriously that they have a special term for it: abfallpolitik, literally translated as "waste politics".
The term was coined some 20 years ago when Germany found itself in danger of drowning in its own waste. As in Ireland, landfills were filling up and authorities started to find illegal dumps containing rotting rubbish in forgotten corners of the countryside.
The waste crisis fed into the general concern about environmental issues among Germans which found a voice in the citizens' initiative groups of the 1970s and the Green Party. The party coined the term "Green" politics in 1980 and has gone on to become the most successful environmentalist party in western Europe. It is the junior partner in the current coalition government, with Green Party ministers for foreign affairs, agriculture and the environment.
Germany began to deal with its waste crisis in the 1980s by building central landfills with proper linings and facilities to extract gases and odours. New laws followed in the 1990s, such as the "cyclical economy" law, designed to save natural resources by recycling materials or waste as much as possible.
The drive to control Germany's waste saw billions spent on new thermal treatment plants that meet stringent new environmental controls.
The Weisweiler plant that treats Irish waste was built in 1997 at a cost of €320 million. It overcame local objections by adopting the newest gas treatment technology that reduces gas emission to below European guidelines. "The plant is one-third incineration and two-thirds gas treatment and environmental controls," said Mr Koch, the plant manager.
The plant has an annual capacity of 360,000 tonnes and the waste burned generates enough steam to generate 35 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 60,000 households.
Irish waste contractors hope that Irish people will grow to accept thermal treatment plants once they understand the benefits.
"People in other countries accept waste-management and thermal-treatment plants because they can see the merit: the waste is disappearing," said Mr David Brendan Keane, managing director of Cara Environmental Technology. "They also see the benefits of waste coming back in the form of energy and in the form of jobs. At the moment the silent majority of Irish people are just happy to get rid of their rubbish and don't ask how."
For Irish operators like Meleadys and Cara, shipping waste for disposal in Germany makes commercial sense despite the bureaucracy and high transportation costs. Meleadys charges Longford residents €400 a year to empty a 240-litre bin and pays the operators of the Wiesweiler plant €120 a tonne.
German incinerator operators however predict things will change dramatically here in 2005, once all waste has to be thermally treated. "Ireland should hurry to build its own plants or start thinking about buying long-term capacity in our plant before we are full up," said Mr Ulrich Koch of Weisweiler facility.
He says that in 2005, prices for Irish waste will first jump to €220 a tonne, the same rate as for German waste, and continue rising as demand increases. "Perhaps the new German regulations will be the motivation Ireland needs to build its own facilities," said Mr Koch, "but dumping untreated waste in the ground is a betrayal of future generations who will have to live with polluted ground water and other consequences."
Back in Longford, Mr Meleady is pleased with his new export business. He is happy to have found someone to take Longford's waste off his hands and, if it has to be incinerated, he is glad it is being incinerated in distant Germany.
"Waste to energy seems like a good idea, but I just have a gut feeling against it," he says. "In an hour a lot of damage can be done if something goes wrong."