Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 5 October 2023
Public Accounts Committee
Health Service Executive: Financial Statements 2023
9:30 am
Mr. Stephen Mulvany:
There will be a need to dispose of both the hand gel and PPE. We are talking about thousands of pallets of this and the average cost of storing a pallet is about €3 per week - I have the numbers here somewhere. This cannot just be tipped. We have gone to the market for soundings on the PPE. Three companies came back but €9.5 million was the only firm figure for end-to-end disposal, so we are looking at the options and we will have to go to tender. Obviously, our preference is not to just landfill it and would be to either recycle or recover energy, where that is possible. Hand gels are more complicated, given the alcohol content, so that has gone out to a specialist company that we have on contract to see whether the level of alcohol in them allows them to be properly incinerated so the energy can be recovered. As the CEO said in his opening statement, we want to dispose of that safely as soon as possible. It will cost money to dispose of it and as soon as we can make a decision on that, we will.