Dublin city recycling initiative to be binned

Efforts by Dublin City Council to encourage recycling on the streets of the capital have gone to waste.

Officials fed up with the public abusing their 3-in-1 bins, designed to take paper, plastic and cans, have decided to remove them.

A spokesman for the City Council said they would be taken off the streets in the next few months.

“We will be looking at phasing out these bins because they are not really working,” the spokesman said.

The bins are at 16 locations around the city centre in the main shopping areas but people are ignoring the signs and continue to use them to dump food and other rubbish.

Council workers are routinely forced to temporarily remove them from the streets for cleaning.

“They haven’t really been a huge success. The problem is that they are just full of contaminants,” the spokesman said.

“There’s absolutely no effort made to use it properly and the effect to date is that they are a mess, they haven’t served the purpose they were intended for.”

The 3-in-1 bins hit the city streets several years ago as part of a joint initiative with Repak covering an area from Henry Street and Liffey Street north of the Liffey through to Dame Street and Camden Street on the south.

And while the bins on the streets may be being abused, Dublin City Council praised the efforts of householders in the capital who are now recycling about one third of their waste.

But the spokesman said this is not being translated on to the main shopping areas of the city.

Compared to other European cities Dublin is doing quite well in terms of recycling, he said, with 67,000 tonnes of waste being recycled every year.

“We are happy that recycling levels have greatly increased. People’s mindsets have changed and people are contributing a lot more to the recycling centres than before.”

And in a further move to keep the streets clean bins around the city centre are to replaced with bigger versions to make room for the huge numbers of freesheet newspapers being dumped every morning by people on their way to work.