BORD NA Móna and private waste firm Oxigen have secured six-month contracts worth about €10 million to dispose of Dublin’s general household waste at landfill sites in Cavan and Kildare from January.
Minister for the Environment John Gormley yesterday said the awarding of the contracts by Dublin City Council exposed the failure of the waste-management policies of the Dublin local authorities.
The authorities will no longer be able to process their own waste from the beginning of next year following the decommissioning of the last municipal landfill serving the region.
While almost 150,000 tonnes of waste will initially be sent to Cavan and Kildare, waste from Dublin households could be landfilled as far away as Limerick, Galway and Monaghan in subsequent contracts.
The Arthurstown landfill, the dump used for the majority of Dublin’s waste, which is owned and operated by South Dublin County Council but is located about 4km over the county border near Kill, Co Kildare, must close by the end of next month.
Dublin City Council had anticipated these closures for more than a decade but had envisaged that the Poolbeg incinerator would be up and running by now. Work on the incinerator began last December, but has been suspended since May and it is unclear when construction will restart.
The council will need private operators to take the waste until the Poolbeg incinerator is operational. It estimates the contracts will cost between €15 million-€20 million a year. Bord na Móna will dispose of up to 120,000 tonnes of waste at the Drehid landfill in Co Kildare, while Oxygen, which operates a landfill in Corranure, Co Cavan, will take up to 25,000.
Both contracts will run from January until next June after which new six-month contracts will be put out to tender.
While Bord na Móna and Oxygen were the successful bidders for the first contracts, other bidders, which were identified by the council as having suitable facilities, have been listed as potential sites which will be considered in the next round. The shortlisted facilities include three landfill sites owned by Greenstar in Wicklow, Meath and Galway. The company is opposed to the construction of the 600,000-tonne capacity Poolbeg incinerator.
Other suitable landfill sites have been identified in Limerick, Monaghan, Louth, Offaly, Carlow and Wexford. The incinerator at Carranstown, Co Meath, which has yet to be constructed, will also be considered in the future.
In a statement yesterday Mr Gormley said it was “disappointing” the councils were sending Dublin’s waste to other counties and it was “the clearest indication of the need for reform in the waste sector”.
The contracts are for waste collected in Dublin city and in the South Dublin County Council area. Fingal County Council still has a small amount of landfill space available to it, but is likely to be involved in the next round of contracts. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has entered into a separate private contract for the collection and disposal of waste.
