Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

If he were a Green Party councillor or Minister in Ireland, he would have more courage than the Irish Green Party representatives have. The Green Party's only alternative to the integrated approach is to talk about some nirvana to do with zero waste when the dogs on the road know this is nonsense. The party leader has opined that zero waste strategy will become the conventional wisdom — perhaps on his particular planet, but not in the real world.

Zero waste became some sort of holy grail in the late 1990s and was about as credible as The Da Vinci Code in that a small number of British Commonwealth countries proposed that zero waste was an option. It is interesting now to examine the so-called zero waste domains. Canberra set targets to achieve zero waste by 2010. Municipalities in New Zealand followed with a target date of 2015. Nova Scotia was to lead the way in North America. Reality, an irritating concept that is foreign to the Green Party, soon intruded. Reality has a nasty habit of doing that. After some initial false dawns, the zero waste nirvana for those countries was never reached. We know that and the Green Party knows that.

Unlike the Irish Green Party, however, the people who promoted zero waste in Australia, New Zealand or Nova Scotia knew when to stop digging. If one looks at their websites, one will see precisely what I mean. On the surface, the one most commonly referenced, Nova Scotia, is an impressive study which the Green Party is fond of citing. It seemed to have a very good target, and it did. It got to the 50% point very quickly but, after that, it got stuck. It should be remembered that Nova Scotia still has a dozen or so landfills. It has an incinerator in a province half the size of County Dublin. It has an incinerator——

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