Mothballed €50m superdump will open eventually, council insists
Declan Daly, assistant county manager, said there would be a requirement for residual landfill in the future and the council had an excellent facility ready to open at Bottlehill.
The council was last year forced to put on hold the opening of the site, 22km north of Cork City, as there was a surplus of landfill sites in the country. Much of the waste generated in Cork is still being disposed of in sites in other counties.
However, Mr Daly told county councillors yesterday that a number of tipheads had since closed in Munster and more closures are in the pipeline which would lead to the Bottlehill site becoming viable again.
“It remains an excellent facility and I would be very confident it will be used at some stage. I don’t think there’s any chance it will be left unused.”
Sharon Corcoran, director of environmental protection services, said it had cost €46.8m to develop the facility. “We’re paying off interest and capital on that. That’s costing around €2m annually through a loan which we got from the European Investment Bank.”
Although Bottlehill had not opened, she said, the council had an obligation to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to conduct environmental monitoring at the site.
Ms Corcoran said the EPA had relaxed some monitoring criteria recently, but it still cost the local authority nearly €200,000 to undertake regular tests.
Cllr Tom Sheahan (FG) said he was hoping that somebody else other than the cash-strapped council would pay for Bottlehill in future years.
Mr Daly, however, insisted once the site was operational, the local authority would be “well placed” to recover its costs.
He said the council had already paid back a significant proportion of the loan acquired. “The current balance on it is €35m.”
Meanwhile, a report given to councillors showed that charges for the disposal of waste at its civic amenity sites had not increased.
