Mr. Sean Scott:

On the illegal dumping issue, we have had an anti-dumping initiative in place since 2017, with €3 million per year invested in that. A total of 3,000 tonnes of waste has been removed through this scheme. Over the years, we have seen that those types of clean-up activities have fallen away and we are now more into prevention awareness. We have a robust regulatory system in place. Currently, we have 140-odd waste enforcement officers throughout the country, with 100 of them being funded at a total cost of €7.6 million through the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications since 2004.

In 2016, we as a sector established a shared service - regional waste enforcement offices - to support enforcement. They are better knowns as the WERLAs and were mentioned earlier. Since then, we have worked through national enforcement priorities. We are looking at homing in on appropriate interventions with regard to household municipal, commercial, illegal and construction waste and the EPR schemes. There is talk about illegal dumping being on the increase and that became very apparent during Covid, but we were able to see that was not the case and that we are seeing the tonnages falling. If we look, as a microcosm of this, at the Pure project in the greater Dublin region, the tonnages have fallen away over recent years. That is a positive story. The tonnages collected through the ADIs, as I said earlier, have fallen right back.

Through the interventions and enforcement and the great work done by waste enforcement officers around the country, we now have some 1.4 million households participating directly in a kerbside system. Then there is another percentage of households - 7% or 8% and the CSO statistics back this up - that have a shared service. There is another percentage cohort that uses the ASI system, so about 95% or 96% of households are partaking in a service in some manner or form. Through our awareness work and everything we are doing as a sector, we think most people are doing the right thing. We are trying our best, within the plan, to further enable them to do so.