Waste in the wrong bins: The dirty little secret of Irish households

With a high degree of waste going into the wrong bins, we are giving up a perfect opportunity to step up on environmental issues. It's time to come clean

Tens of thousands of tonnes of misdirected rubbish go to waste facilities.

FOOD waste reduction and proper segregation remain a dirty, disgraceful business in Ireland. In both the domestic and commercial sectors, more than two-thirds of waste could have been placed in the recycling or organic waste bins.

Drilling down on the chaos in some homes, a recently released assessment carried out for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), reveals that 7.7% of even the nasty old black bin (mixed-residual-waste or MRW) from household waste was contaminated. This is from waste toxic to its inclusion in landfill or as an incinerator material (paint, batteries, and chemicals for example). Almost 10% of what we put into the recycling bin (mixed-dry-recyclables or MDR) was contaminated. That’s one bad hit in 10. This material was either wet or dirty or not suited for that stream. These gate-crashers can bump up against and contaminate other acceptable things jammed in there — so the whole lot can end up as general waste. That’s tens of thousands of tonnes of misdirected rubbish.