Waste plants cannot handle plastic ‘mountain’
Farmers in north Munster have been told that they may have to provide storage for the increasing volume of plastic which has built up on their farms for at least another season “because the arrangements for recycling cannot handle the volume”.
Limerick County IFA Chairman, Michael Roche, told a meeting of the Limerick County Executive at Adare that it is expected to be some considerable time yet before the “once-off” collection of old plastic from farms to clear the backlog is extended to the county.
“The problem is that the re-cycling plant at Inverness in Scotland where the plastic is being sent is not able to handle the volume which has turned out to be much greater than has been anticipated“, he said. “I know that the Minister has announced the extension of the collection to five more counties, but my understanding is that nothing will happen in relation to providing the service in these counties until the backlog of plastic which has been taken in from the pilot counties is disposed of. They are just not able to cope with the volume of plastic which is turning up on the farms”, he added.
He told the farmers that the amount of plastic which had been collected in the pilot counties was much larger than had been expected, and estimates of the volume of old plastic on farms had proved not to be correct.
This had meant that the processing task was bigger than had been planned for and will take longer because the re-cycling plant can only cope with so much at the time. “The result of this has been, as I understand it, that nothing has happened in the next phase of the scheme and plastic will not be collected until the backlog is cleared. County Limerick is not included in the second phase, and it looks likely that it could take up to 12 months before the collection service is extended to the county”, he told the farmers.
