Ireland's waste management crisis has been well signposted, but there is little indication that progress is being made, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
It is now nearly four years since the first of Ireland's regional waste management plans - covering Dublin city and county - was unveiled.
Yet major elements of it, including a municipal incinerator and replacement landfill sites, remain to be implemented.
Households in the capital have been supplied with green bins for dry recyclables and grey bins for ordinary waste. But only two of the four local authorities - Dublin City Council and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council - have imposed household waste charges.
These charges, amounting to £95 per household per annum, were seen as crucial to achieve the goal of cutting dependence on landfill from 80 per cent for all wastes in 1997 to 16 per cent by 2004. Because the fact is that recycling is a "loss leader" activity that must be subsidised.
Many councillors, fearing a public backlash over "double taxation", strenuously opposed charging people for the waste they produce - as if they had never heard of the "polluter pays" principle. In several rural counties, councillors refused to adopt waste management plans.
In some cases, they could not even bring themselves to agree on plans that included any waste disposal facilities, whether these were landfill sites or thermal treatment plants. If rubbish had to be got rid of, it was not going to be anywhere near their own electoral areas.
That's why the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, had to rush new legislation through the Oireachtas last spring stripping councillors of their decision-making powers on waste management and transferring these powers to county managers for the time being.
Mr Dempsey was acutely aware of the deepening waste crisis. Local authorities were running out of landfill space while the volume of waste was growing exponentially as a by-product of the booming economy. Some dumps had also been closed on environmental grounds.
Take Dublin's regional waste management strategy. It was prepared by an Irish-Danish group, MCCK, who took nothing for granted. They were told that 900,000 tonnes of waste needed to be planned for, but discovered the actual volume was closer to 2.3 million tonnes.
Much of the additional volume consisted of non-hazardous commercial-industrial waste as well as construction and demolition waste - builders' rubble, in plain language - which had been hugely inflated by the frenetic level of building activity generated by the Celtic Tiger.
In other northern European countries, builders' rubble is not regarded as "waste" at all. Denmark, for example, recycles up to 90 per cent of it by crushing bricks and mortar for re-use. Here, however, most of it was - and still is - going to landfill sites, filling them up before time.
But it was Fingal County Council's decision last June not to accept commercial-industrial waste at its Baleally landfill site that precipitated the current crisis, leaving many companies with no option but to seek disposal facilities elsewhere - including illegal dumps in Co Wicklow.
The truth, of course, is that much of the non-hazardous waste emanating from the commercial and industrial sectors could be recycled - just look at the piles of "rubbish" left out on Grafton Street or Henry Street any evening for collection by Dublin City Council's refuse trucks.
Waste disposal charges have also risen steeply. At £80 per tonne in Baleally, a truck carrying 25 tonnes of waste would have to pay £2,000 to deposit its load there. But it could cost as little as £60 per truck to dump at a disused quarry in Co Wicklow, no questions asked.
With a landfill levy of £10 per tonne due to be introduced early in 2002, the incentive to find convenient holes in the ground will become even greater - unless, of course, the current crackdown on illegal dumping is intensified and the law of the land is seen to be strictly enforced.
There is also an urgent need for new landfill sites and other disposal facilities, including waste incinerators. This is not going to be easy because no community anywhere in the Republic would willingly accept such facilities; indeed, all such plans are being fought tooth and nail.
One method of overcoming public opposition that seems to work elsewhere would involve compensating communities for "hosting" a landfill or incinerator on behalf of the wider population by providing, say, a swimming pool or other new amenities for the locality.
This was among the measures proposed by Forfás in its recent report on ways to tackle the growing waste crisis. Others included fast-track planning procedures for new waste disposal facilities and a national waste management agency with "step-in" powers to implement plans.
The Forfás task force warned that waste management in Ireland, already at a "critical point", would deteriorate further - even acting as a potential brake on the expansion of the enterprise sector - unless measures to improve the situation were speedily implemented.