Roche determined to push ahead with incineration plans

With only eight years of landfill left, the minister with responsibility for waste has declared incineration is the way forward

Despite widespread public disquiet, the Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, is determined to press ahead with plans to build incinerators to deal with Ireland's growing waste problem.

Commenting on the publication of the National Waste Report 2004, published by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), on 10 January the Minister said that we have no choice but to face up to the waste problem that is threatening to engulf us.

The EPA report claimed that existing landfill expansion is becoming increasingly problematic in that the entire State has on average only eight years municipal landfill space left. The report also claimed that the situation was even worse in the Dublin region, with only 2.6 years landfill space available.

Dublin has effectively used up all its indigenous locations, and has been relying on landfill sites in adjoining counties, Meath, Wicklow and Kildare, to deal with the growing city's growing problem.

Residents of the adjoining counties have become increasingly restive about Dublin's waste being dumped on them, and the Minister – who represents Wicklow – also acknowledges that landfill creates environmental problems of its own, particularly in areas of natural beauty like Wicklow.

The Minister has argued that there have been important improvements in levels of recycling, pointing out the report's finding that the 2013 target of 35 per cent recycling of municipal waste was effectively achieved by 2004. But, he argues, it is just not serious politics to suggest that an immediate target of zero waste as an alternative to incineration is achievable.

"Whether people like it or not," he said, "there are no two ways about it – we must have incineration."

He went on: "Of course, this doesn't mean that we should incinerate everything. On the contrary we should recycle everything we can, we should reduce our overall levels of waste, we should compost organic waste, but in the last analysis we must incinerate the rest."

Not surprisingly, the organisations opposed to incineration are less than impressed by the Minister's words. Seán Cronin, chairman of the Zero Waste Alliance and formerly active in CHASE, the Cork Harbour Alliance for a Safe Environment, commented that what the Minister was saying was akin to leaving a tap running and building a bigger bath rather than turning the tap off. "We've got to turn the tap off," he said.

However, the Minister refutes this. He claims that the figures show that the tap is being turned off, but that despite increased levels of recycling and composting we still have a problem that cannot be ignored, and that cannot be solved by landfill.

At the moment a certain amount of incineration is being carried out at individual sites with companies dealing with their own waste, but it is hard to see how this is an improvement on a general incineration site.

Politically, this is difficult stuff for any Government, especially going in to an election year. Fianna Fáil will probably lose votes in Cork over this, but don't think that the incineration issue will be decisive: they should still hold two seats in Cork East, and will probably lose one in Cork South Central anyway. In Meath, the other named location for an incinerator is in the new Meath East constituency where Fianna Fáil will be hard pressed to take two out of three even without the incineration issue.

But elsewhere, it is thought it will only become an issue if an incinerator is announced locally.

Another factor in the incineration debate is that other countries are becoming increasingly reluctant to accept toxic waste from countries like Ireland, and in future we may have no option but to deal with this ourselves, as is planned in one of the Ringaskiddy incinerators.

Toxic landfill is just as contentious an issue as incineration, and the EPA report shows that there is just one landfill licensed to handle hazardous waste, the KTK landfill in Co Kildare. This has a limit of 3,000 tonnes of asbestos waste, for example, each year, but local authority and industry figures indicate that 3,453 tonnes of hazardous waste were landfilled in 2004. Where did the balance go?

But, confronted by such significant public disquiet, the Minister is trying to shift the focus of the debate away from the principle of incineration to issues of standards and monitoring. "We must meet people's concerns about incineration," he said, "by showing that we can have the highest standards of environmental and public health protection in the design and operation of incinerators."

This is easy to say, but it will be more difficult to convince a sceptical public, – already agitated by concerns about Rip Off Ireland – that the Government is either competent enough or committed enough to deliver on their fine words.

And apart from the contentious issue of incineration, the EPA report also shows that in 2004 we exported 70,000 tonnes of mixed municipal waste to Germany for incineration and to the North for composting. The EPA has called for the establishment of an indigenous recycling industry here to take advantage of our growing levels of recycling, and achieve here the benefits of recycling that other economies have developed.

Eoin Ó Murchú is the Eagraí Polaitíochta of RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta. He is writing here in a personal capacity.