Ireland has become the "dirty old man of Europe", Green Party leader Trevor Sargent said when urging the Government to tackle Ireland's waste problem.
He said that instead of adopting a strategy to reduce waste, Ireland had a policy of increasing waste.
"I have witnessed in Canada how a strategy focused on reducing waste year by year, to achieve zero waste in due course, can work if political will and community empowerment are strong enough. People want to recycle and compost."
The Green Party moved a Private Member's motion, debated over two days, condemning the practice by local authorities of charging for community-level civic recycling facilities and the Government's failure to divert waste away from landfill.
Party environment spokesman Ciaran Cuffe said there should be checks to ensure that all material sent for reprocessing actually got recycled.
Party chairman John Gormley accused Minister for Justice Michael McDowell of failing to honour commitments to his constituents on opposing an incinerator on the Poolbeg peninsula.
Ruairí Quinn (Labour, Dublin South East) said the choice of Poolbeg was the first in "a series of bizarre and illogical decisions" made by the Department of the Environment.
"Poolbeg is at the heart of one of the most valuable assets this city has: Dublin Bay," he said
Minister for the Environment Dick Roche said that, unlike the "eco-mysticism" of the Green Party, the Government's policies were grounded in the principle of integrated waste management.
"This focuses on waste prevention, a feature of our recent policy document, and minimisation as the main priority, followed by reuse, recycling, energy recovery and utilising landfill as a last resort for residual waste."
