Ireland’s flip-flopping approach to the burning question

I DON’T do it. But every weekend, I want to do it. I want to take assorted rubbish, create a waffle-weave support system of twigs and branches, and set fire to the lot in the back garden. The smell of a bonfire on a sunny afternoon turns me on.

My father used to stuff garden waste and anything else handy into a black oversized bucket and set fire to it on Saturday afternoons. He would then sit down in the smoke and listen to sport on the radio. The neighbours hated him. My mother complained that she couldn’t put out washing because of the smuts. My older sister complained that she couldn’t put me out because I would wheeze. Dad would regard it as a good day’s work when the garbage was reduced to a handful of lumpy ash.

It seemed at the time an annoying but relatively harmless idiosyncrasy, of which my father had many.

Today, it’s illegal. It’s officially called backyard burning. According to John Curtis, Ireland is full of unreconstructed backyard burners. Curtis is an economist with the Environmental Protection Agency, which has just undertaken an interesting bit of research into the nation’s attitude to the environment. Not the environment, that vast cosmic entity currently developing a white-hot glow, but the local, up-close-and-personal environment.

“Public Perceptions, Attitudes and Values on the Environment — a National Survey” from the Strategic Policy Research Unit at the EPA emerges from telephone interviews with several thousand citizens of all persuasions.

Some of its findings are cheery. John Curtis writes that the adult population, for example, “strongly favours increasing the level of environmental protection through recruitment of additional enforcement staff, viewing additional expenditures on enforcement in the range €235-320 million worthwhile and value for money”.

Great stuff. Dick Roche can feel free to increase taxes for environmental purposes without the Government parties suffering at the next general election.

It’s the key findings section of the survey which offers an unexpected laugh, due to the juxtaposition of findings 1 and 2:

1) Almost half of Irish adults claim to consider waste management the most important environmental issue facing Ireland today.

2) One-in-10 adults admitted to burning their household waste, while 15% believe backyard burning of household waste is acceptable.

Now, THERE’S a “Gotcha”. Was it Scott Fitzgerald who suggested that the capacity to hold two mutually contradictory views at the same time was a mark of genius? By that count, on environmental matters, we’re geniuses.

We’re properly concerned about, and correctly prioritise waste management, and then we lash out into the back garden and set fire to yesterday’s leftovers, sprinkling dioxins on ourselves, our neighbours and the grass which will be ingested by animals we will, in turn, ingest, dioxins and all.

The EPA found that one out of every 10 people in this country admits to burning household waste. The actual figure, John Curtis admits, is likely to be higher. “The statistics represent only people who actually admit engaging in the illegal activity.”

Secret backyard burners don’t admit for a number of reasons. Some of them know it’s illegal, and even in a phone survey are not going to provoke the possibly punitive EPA by confessing to a crime.

Some of them believe they have no choice, since they’re among the 23% of households not currently served by a waste collection service. It’s been estimated that a quarter of a million tonnes of uncollected household waste is generated every year. Which would make for a lot of backyard bonfires.

“Some households without service personally transport waste to landfills,” the EPA says firmly. Of course they do. Nonetheless, 27 local authorities say that backyard burning (waste disposal “in an unauthorised manner”) is a significant problem in their catchment area.

Now, here’s the great paradox. Say the word “incinerator” in any one of those 27 local authority regions, and listen to the indrawn breaths. The very mention of an incinerator creates an oh my god moment, as people contemplate the horror of clouds of dioxins coming from its stack.

The reality, of course, is that modern incinerators have so many scrubbers and other cleansing devices built in that they emit virtually no dioxins.

Backyard bonfires, on the other hand, are quite simply the greatest source of dioxins in Ireland.

Dioxins are lethal carcinogens. Dioxins will make an unseen and unheard but major contribution to the doubling of the cancer rate in this country over the next 20 years. The majority of those cancer-causing dioxins will come from “harmless” local backyard burning.

A lot of it will be done, according to the EPA, in less densely-populated areas. 15% of rural dwellers do it and nearly as many people living in small villages burn their garbage, too. What’s astonishing about the new research is that it shows as many as one in 25 people who live in CITIES burn their household rubbish.

What’s daft about all this is the claim made by 95% of respondents to the survey that they recycle.

Maybe they do. But if 95% of the population recycle, why are some of the recyclers then undoing the good they’ve done by committing arson around their back gardens? Similarly, if the great majority of people accept that backyard burning is both unacceptable and unsafe, why are some of them still persisting in it? It may be that the backyard burners find it more convenient to set fire to their trash just outside the back door than to engage in the other, equally sneaky alternatives, which require a bit of travel.

One of those illegal alternatives is what’s called “fly tipping,” a term which makes turfing your black plastic bag full of festering tripe on the side of the road sound slightly less disgusting than it is. But here, again, the EPA’s research has exposed weird contradictions.

Apparently, although we disapprove of illegal dumping and illegal burning of rubbish, we Irish see the illegal dumping of household waste as considered less socially acceptable than burning. Littering the roadway, according to our mad mindset, is worse than combusting aged comestibles into cancer-causing cocktails. We still do it, of course, just as about 5% of us take our domestic rubbish with us in the car and feck it into public waste paper bins, or, if it’s been a big weekend, load it into a sturdy black plastic sack and heave it into a business skip.

“A minority — but a substantial minority — of people admit to illegally disposing of their waste,” John Curtis says. “It’s unlikely awareness campaigns will dissuade all of them from such activities.

“Especially when we know that many of the people burning household waste are well aware of the harmful environmental and health consequences.”

Which is polite, neutral EPA-speak for: the backyard burners know bloody well the damage they’re doing, so appealing to their better nature, of which they have none, is a waste of time.

A little zero-tolerance environmental policing matched by public-spirited informing, on the other hand, might be remarkably effective. Especially since the public are willing to pay for it.

Or so they claim.