We’re wasting time: bin the wheelie and give the green light to incentives

Do you remember the passionate protests against the introduction of such devices, with poorer people complaining about the weekly drain on their tight money supply?

THE man in my life pointed at the series of plastic monstrosities in the garage and demanded: “What the hell are those yokes?”

The smallest, I told him, was a segregated rubbish container for the kitchen, allowing ordinary rubbish to be kept separate from bottles, cans and paper. The pointy one was a Green Cone, into which we would scoop our food waste, which would reduce itself inside it so that 90% of today’s leftovers would become water, so enriched with nutrients that when it flowed into the ground under the roses, it would make them grow as big as cabbages. The bigger one was for green waste that would compost itself. And the really tall, really ugly one was a water barrel to be attached to a downpipe leading from the gutter on the roof, to capture rainwater.

“We have a tap,” he said mildly.

“Yes, but you never know the day nor the hour when climate change is going to cause the local authority to impose a hose-pipe ban and turn the garden into a desert.”

I didn’t tell him about the wind turbine the alternative energy expert says will hoover up the “very productive wind” around the house. I didn’t even mention the solar panels.

It might be a bit previous, since we haven’t yet found where the previous owners left the key to open the front door and he’s getting fed up coming through the garage. The sophistication of solar panels and photo-voltaic cells is low on his priority list, right now.

I did tell him, though, that the Green Cone alone (according to the guy who sells it in Ireland, Kevin Coleman, who seems to do his own deliveries on the off-chance of further enthusing purchasers about its environmental contribution) will save us a fortune on waste collection charges. Coleman says he hasn’t needed to put out a wheelie for so long, he’s urging his local authority to take the thing back and give it to someone else.

One thousand Green Cones, according to international research, reduce what goes to landfill by 250 tonnes a year. For an initial cost of €185, each digests a quarter of a ton of waste annually, while returning valuable nutrients to the soil. In theory, then, local authorities should be planting one in everybody’s garden.

The new Environment Minister might usefully investigate why this isn’t happening. The reason would seem to lie in the fact that so many of the local authorities have now outsourced their waste collection. If you’ve contracted with a company to visit all the roads in the area, elevating and emptying wheelie bins using costly automated trucks and employing a workforce to hurl the wheelies back into (approximately) the place they came from, those contract collectors might see it as a restraint of trade, were the local authority to subsequently undercut their market by supplying food disposers and composters to residents.

Canadian local authorities, in contrast, have enthusiastically embraced the concept.

Roughly 300 of them now supply the food digesters to households. Of course, Irish local authorities know how long it takes to educate a generation in waste management. From bitter experience, they know it, as material that should be in green bins goes into black wheelies, and material that should be in black wheelies turns up in brown bins.

IT’S worth consideration, nonetheless. Many people who consider themselves environmentally friendly tend to express it by venting about incineration and landfill. They could reduce the need for both by taking care of their own waste food and green waste on site, thereby putting themselves and their offspring in charge of an issue that has too often seemed too big to be tackled, other than by local or central government.

They could, while they’re at it, greatly improve neighbourhood aesthetics. The wheelie bin may be the ugliest front-of-house decoration ever invented.

A food digester at the bottom of your back garden, on the other hand, pleasingly surrounded by shrubs (which will last two to three months longer than normal each year, thanks to their roots sucking up the good stuff the leftovers from the barbecue degrade into) is barely noticeable.

More sizeable high tech versions of the food digester technology are now available for hotels and restaurants. The take-up has been remarkably small. The habit of firing food waste into massive plastic containers to be hauled off to landfill seems to be deeply engrained in the thinking of those in the hospitality business. It should be removed from their thinking, pronto.

This comes down to practical leadership, rather than big policy-making.

Speeding up Ireland’s delivery on its emissions-reduction target is admirable.

The Greens can rightly point to it as something they got out of going into government with their erstwhile enemies, Fianna Fáil. It’s vitally important. But it’s also, by nature, an enviro-nerd issue that does not involve active participation by the individual citizen, except perhaps where those citizens can be persuaded to get out of their cars now and then.

Resolutions to drive less and walk or cycle more have a high rate of failure, because, like giving up cigarettes, you may know you’re doing yourself and everybody else a long-term favour, but the more immediate payoff is lousy.

The immediate payoff for not having to invest each week in stickers for a wheelie bin is small but tangible. Do you remember the passionate protests against the introduction of such devices, with poorer people complaining about the weekly drain on their tight money supply?

The kick of adopting a new habit that doesn’t require you sweating in the rain on a bike or on foot is another small payoff. Boasting to friends and relatives about how your family is restoring goodness to the soil is a third.

All of this could be jump-started by personal environmental leadership and by incentivising industries to quit stuffing landfills with materials that should be broken down on site and used on site.

It’s not that hard. A couple of decades back, when Ireland was about to get its collective knuckles rapped by the EU because the country was dragging its wheels on changing over to unleaded petrol, the then Environment Minister Pádraig Flynn did something very smart. He persuaded the Finance Minister to drop the price of unleaded petrol below the price of leaded petrol in his budget. Within months, the pattern of petrol use had changed and Ireland was back on target. It wouldn’t have happened if the Department of Environment and Local Government had gone the traditional way of running expensive advertising and PR plans designed to make drivers see the error of their ways.

Incentivising people to see the potential of personal change is one of the most powerful and underestimated options open to any government.