Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 8 April 2014
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Environment, Culture and the Gaeltacht
Towards a Zero Waste Approach to Water: Dublin Institute of Technology
2:20 pm
Mr. Liam McCarton:
The figure on the slide is incorrect as it is more than 600,000 installations. Without going into detail on this, although we may do so later, it is worth mentioning that if we look across Europe, particularly in Germany, France and Belgium, which are the main markets, the rainwater harvesting market was estimated to be worth close to €500 million in 2009. This is not a new technology, and certainly not new to Ireland where it has been practised for generations. We believe it could potentially have a role to play, particularly in terms of innovations within water management.
As we are moving quite quickly, we can return to any of these issues later. With regard to recycling, we are looking at zero discharge, which was originally developed in Denmark and on which we have done a lot of work for various local authorities in Dublin.