Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

I wish to share time with Deputies Cuffe and Sargent, if the Leas-Cheann Comhairle agrees.

There has been much talk about waste to energy or the use of energy cover to explain what is going on. As a councillor at the time when some of these decisions were made in the late 1990s, I confirm that no one ever mentioned energy. This was never on the agenda. It was purely a waste solution problem. In terms of burning, the reality is now 600,000 or 700,000 tonnes at Poolbeg, which originally started off at 300,000 or 400,000 tonnes. The plant inexorably grew in size over recent years. When one considers the energy output from it, one sees this is not an energy facility. With the equivalent of whatever number of chimneys are put into Poolbeg one could build seven turbines within eyesight out on the Kish bank and provide the same amount of energy. If we need to provide that energy we should develop the turbines in the Kish bank, which were planned many years ago.

The energy return from this, however, is remarkably poor. We are using up valuable natural resources. Plastics will have to go into this incinerator to make it burn or else fuel will have to be added. Effectively, we are taking oil-based products, scarce valuable materials which will increase in price, and burning them, and that is a waste of energy. Do not take it from me, take it from the British Plastics Federation, which said in a report on the matter that in energy terms, recycling of plastic made far more sense than incineration. Recycling one aluminium can saves 90% of the energy needed to produce a new one. Recycling 1 kg of plastics saves another 1.5 kgs of CO2 that is needed — and CO2 is our energy measurement as much as anything else these days. Again, that is saved if we are recycling.

Manufacturing newsprint requires 2.5 times the amount of energy that we generate from burning it. Manufacturing glass requires 30 times the energy we would get from burning it. So this does not make energy sense. If we are serious about our energy policy, and we need to be, we certainly need to address it, but incineration will not solve our energy problems. Incineration is about dealing with waste in a certain manner. We do not agree on this side of the House that this is an effective, intelligent way of dealing with it. Matters have changed remarkably in the seven or eight years since the plan for the environment was hatched in the Department and imposed on local authorities around the country. What we have seen in the meantime is that people can, and will, go in the direction about which we are talking. In my council in Dún Laoghaire, in one year between 2004 and 2005, the tonnage brought to civic amenity increased 165%. The tonnage brought to bring banks increased 16%. The tonnage of green bin waste collected increased 25%. People want to do this. They want the alternative. Once they start putting stuff in the green bin, they do not want to go back. We are telling people we now need some of their waste because we need to burn it. That is not the clever way forward. It is not what the people of this city, Cork or any other part of the country want to do. They know they can do the right thing and recycle and that in energy, natural resource and economic terms, as well as in environmental terms, it is the clever thing to do.

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