Talk the Talk

Steve Cowman, chief executive of waste management company Greenstar, talks to David Clerkin.

You took over at Greenstar in November, but you’ve no background in waste. Why did you take the job?

My background is in electrical engineering. I ran the General Instruments plant in Cork and also worked for Volex and GE. NTR (Greenstar’s parent) wanted somebody coming from a multinational corporate environment, similar to our main customers. Our major customers are big pharmaceuticals and other multinationals like Intel. Greenstar has gone from a start-up to a business with €80 million turnover and 500 employees in four years. It’s big, but we want to be bigger. We plan to double the business in three years.

Tell me about your business.

Thirty per cent of our turnover comes from landfill, 20-25% comes from waste consultancy and 15% from handling domestic waste. The rest is transaction-driven and involves casual business and contract work.

I understand Greenstar plans to invest €80 million this year. How will it spend the money?

We’ll spend a total of €180 million over the next three years. When people think of waste management, they think it’s just trucks. But it’s a very capital intensive business. A landfill site can cost between €25 million and €50 million. A materials recovery site, which separates waste into streams, can cost up to €15 million.

Can you give us an idea of the scale of a landfill operation?

There’s a big difference between a dump and a landfill. A landfill is a highly-engineered facility. It’s fully lined, so no liquid can escape, and has sophisticated systems for chemical analysis. There may also be some recycling and materials recovery on the site.

A typical landfill operation can have a footprint of up to 350 acres. But within that, the landfill itself would be about 40 acres, so there’s a boundary between the landfill and its surrounding area. They can take about 100,000 tonnes of waste per year.

What are the main issues in the waste industry at the moment?

There are two key issues. The first is competitiveness. Waste has become a major cost component of Irish business. Because the country hasn’t invested in waste infrastructure, there’s a deficit out there. Landfill in the UK costs about €60 per tonne, but in Ireland it’s €150 per tonne. The number of local authority-run landfill sites has fallen from 87 in 1995 to 35 today. There’s simply not enough capacity.

The second issue is compliance. There’s a lot of illegal activity, such as unlicensed dumping, and for reputable businesses it is a nightmare to enter into a contract with a dodgy operator.