Mr. Séamus Clancy:

I will answer three questions together in one reply. To date we have 1,695 members who have joined up to Repak ELT. Of that, quite a number of producers and retailers in the North have already signed up. I am not sure of the exact number but we can come back to the committee with that. They will be accountable for the tyres they place on the market in the South. We have 21 collectors signed up at the moment and there are five more in the process. They must have tax clearance certificates and waste permits for collection. They must have licences for storage and they must have authorised facilities to bring those tyres for recycling or recovery.

Senator McDowell asked about recycling. In Ireland today we only have one recycling facility for this waste and it is in County Louth. It can currently facilitate up to 20,000 tyres. It is taking approximately 8,000 tyres for recycling and it produces crumb rubber from that. It is a new facility. An existing facility went to the wall. With regard to recovery, the facility in Limerick owned by Cement Roadstone Holdings, CRH, is looking to take in tyres for recovery. The actual steel in the tyre is used as clinker for manufacturing cement. Outside of that, all of the rest of the tyres currently leave Ireland mainly for recovery abroad to locations such as India, Korea, some to Turkey and to South America. All of those facilities are now being dealt with on the basis that they have authorised legal permanent facilities given by the specific country. We now have full traceability. Heretofore there was no accountability in the traceability of tyres for where they went, inside the country or outside. Under the new regulations that are now required, we have a cradle-to-grave solution. Producers putting tyres on the market now have to account for who they sell their tyres to, be they wholesalers or retailers, for who collects the tyres and for where they end up. Of course as this is a new scheme there will be leakage. On the first phase we identified 2.6 million tyres collected last year but we know there are considerably more than that placed on the market. No one in this room knows the exact quantity of tyres that are placed on the market. It is estimated at somewhere between 3.4 million and 4 million tyres. The whole idea of this scheme is to give full accountability and traceability for the tyres placed on the market.