Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State noted there is evidence that the pay by weight system removes a significant amount of waste away from landfill. The point I was making is that if a person has a municipal bin and is paying for it and is getting a bin for the other, non-compost, waste, the person will separate it out. If a person has a compost bin, he or she will separate out that waste. The household is doing the job when it behaves that way. If the Minister of State introduces this change and starts charging by weight for all those bins, what will stop people putting the whole lot in the one bin? Will they not revert to their previous habits? That is the point I am making. The approach is counterproductive.

The Minister of State in her response said, on recycling centres, that it will all be collected at the door by having these three bins. The difficulty is that there are things that will never be collected such as large quantities of green waste, hazardous waste such as paint and other household waste. There is an inadequacy in terms of where recycling centres are located. They need to be mapped to see where the gaps lie. There are locations where the need is not being met, including my area. There is no such recycling centre in the whole of north Kildare.

I would value the Minister of State's response to the amendment tabled which concerns the database and privacy. I think it is amendment No. 19. I was at a committee meeting yesterday - perhaps it was Tuesday; I am losing count of the days of the week - at which an official from the Data Protection Commissioner's office spoke about designing privacy into a system. Increasingly, we will have to do that because we are running into data protection issues all the time. Data have become a commodity and quite a valuable one. How data are collected, databases are used and data protection issues intersect is quite important in respect of these changes as well, and I would like to hear what the Minister of State has to say on it.

In the UK, where they went for a competitive tendering model, they retained the apparatus, the landfills and all the trucks and such things. Essentially people tendered to run the service. That gave an income to the local authorities to deal with, for example, closed landfills, which can be very expensive to maintain. Perhaps they were very old landfills without proper lining and there is leachate which needs to be converted into gas and abstracted from the site and so forth. We have gone a completely different route which has left the local authorities even more exposed as they have to deal with the residual problem of the closed landfills but without any income stream to do so. Those are the key points on which I would like to hear from the Minister of State.

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