Minister backs incinerators in waste battle

More incinerators could be built to deal with Ireland’s growing waste mountain, Environment Minister Dick Roche said today.

With households churning out more than 1.5 million tonnes of rubbish a year, the minister insisted that burning more waste had to be considered as part of a wider strategy.

“The biggest tough decision that we have to make now is going to be on incineration,” he said.

“You don’t need an incinerator in every county, that’s the first point. But we will need incinerators and we will have to have a number of incinerators.”

Mr Roche said without incineration 75% of waste will end up in landfill sites. And he insisted that he would not rule out an incinerator for his own constituency in Co Wicklow.

“If my constituents were being asked to put up with another large landfill or put up with a power station that would have clean energy produced by waste - which was not going to have emissions and which was going to be properly monitored and was going to have the highest world standards – I would actually go for that,” he said.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s annual waste report for 2004 found more than 3 million tonnes of waste was created last year. But worryingly the EPA reported that a quarter of all households were not using refuse collection services and hundreds of tonnes of hazardous waste were going missing.

The report, however, revealed that Ireland was close to hitting the 2013 target to recycle 35% of municipal waste – that from households, shops and the streets – with 32.6% of rubbish being reused.

The body also noted that 74% of material recycled was processed abroad in Spain, the UK, Holland and China. It called for an indigenous recycling industry to be set up dealing mainly with glass, metals, paper and cardboard.

Ciaran Cuffe, Green Party environment spokesman, warned that shipping waste abroad for someone else to deal with was not the answer.

“The fact remains that we are producing the most waste of any country in Europe, we are producing the most packaging waste of any country in Europe,” the Dun Laoghaire TD said.

“I don’t think we should pat ourselves on the back if all we are doing is putting it into containers and sending it off on a slow boat to China.”

Mr Cuffe said the Government needed to encourage people to reduce the amount of waste produced in the first place. And he insisted the public had to be given more choices for waste disposal than burning or burying.

But Mr Roche insisted that incineration should be part of a fully integrated waste management system.

“We can’t have a system where we expect somebody in Germany to actually handle our hazardous waste, or we expect somebody in Germany to handle our domestic waste,” he said.

“We have to start dealing with our problems in Ireland.”

The National Waste Report 2004 revealed that 453 tonnes of hazardous material, harmful to human health, was unaccounted for.

The report noted there was just one landfill licensed to handle hazardous waste – the KTK landfill in Co Kildare, which is authorised to accept a maximum of 3,000 tonnes of asbestos waste per year.

But in 2004 local authorities and industry certified that 3,453 tonnes of hazardous waste had been landfilled.

The report welcomed the improved efforts to recycle packaging waste, claiming they were even more successful, with 56% of all packaging waste being recovered, exceeding the EU target of 50% one year ahead of schedule.