Sir, - I have been following the debate in Ireland on new land-fills and proposed incineration plants over the past several years. I am a senior ecologist and specialist in waste management and I deal in "bones and rags" and food waste for various processing facilities in Europe and the west coast of the USA and Canada and worked recently in Ireland on composting systems.
It is not surprising that many people do not want large centralised facilities, even if they are purported to be state of the art, in their communities. The fact is that large scale technologies or facilities are often neither environmentally or socially sustainable. With the best of intentions, city planners and consultants can easily feel that they have the best technical solutions for disposing of solid wastes and then try to convince others about the technical and environmental merits of their choices. This is a top-down procedure and one liable to be challenged time and again by local communities.
Certainly, waste-processing such as composting must be economic and this requires a certain minimum size (say perhaps up to 3,000 tonnes per year) but large facilities including landfills generate a lot of lorry traffic and of course increased automobile emissions. Largish cities like Vancouver, Canada and Dublin, my native city, generate a great deal of rubbish and it is tempting to transport this stuff to facilities in rural areas. In Europe it is fortunately less easy to do this than in North America.
It is surely time for city engineers etc to work with scientists in industry and post-secondary institutions and in community groups to look at more environmentally and socially acceptable technologies for recycling and processing of wastes.
For example, it is feasible to have a manageable number of satellite facilities where waste is processed and converted to useful products that link with community and local businesses where finished compost can be used for such local commercial activities as nursery, mushroom production and reclamation. Such community based, satellite facilities would reduce the overall amount of wastes that need to be landfilled.
Also, while the kerbside recycling program in the Dublin area will be useful to encourage people to recycle, it is, like many others elsewhere, suspect on economic grounds. In Ireland, there are good opportunities to learn from the lessons that other countries and regions have found and come up with an appropriate blend of recycling and processing strategies. - Yours, etc.,
Alan Carter, Vancouver, Canada.