Taking back control over waste collection

Ireland’s current waste collection is shambolic. With multiple service providers, each street/road is littered with bins virtually every day of the week. And a certain percentage of householders don’t appear to have the mental ability or civic spirit to present waste of a certain type on the day in question. Causing private contractor rejection of waste – which lingers until it is attacked by animals and the residue is left on the street.

As in many aspects of Irish life, it would be difficult to invent a worse way of doing things.

It was encouraging to read of Dublin City Council’s vote to change the ‘system’. (please see link below).

Perhaps others local authorities might take note? It seems to me that while private waste collectors may be the most efficient (in terms of collecting?), they do not need to be duplicated and triplicated on the same street/road. Each (dumb) Eircode routing code might be used to define an area to be put out to tender by a local authority. Giving one operator a license for say five to seven years to clean up a routing code (eg T23 or D02) etc – based on a tender and quality of service requirement. The operators could tender for a fixed price per point of collection type (eg house, secondary home, restaurant, shop, office, factory etc) on different bases of charge. And collect the charge either directly or via LPT.

www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/dublin-city-council-vote-to-take-charge-of-bin-service-934187.html

And when it is collected, the majority of the material needs to be recycled either into other tangible marketable products or energy (as happens in much of the rest of Europe). Ireland is a large waster of power at thermal electricity generation stations and land fill sites. Many other European countries have incinerated waste to create energy since the mid 1800s. This allows the recycling centre to return energy in the form of hot or chilled water to its catchment area. (Which is far more efficient than converting it into electricity or worse still land filling it or storing it ad infinitum in a warehouse). The life expectancy of people who live in areas with well managed incineration is far higher than the average Irish life expectancy (eg Monaco 89 years - where waste to energy has been the norm for over a century).