Seanad debates
Wednesday, 5 November 2003
Waste Management: Statements.
It is vital that we structure our system so as to encourage the use that we want. This comes down to a matter of how the collection services are charged. I will give an example of how this can work. In Fingal we have bins and we pay for a label to attach to them each week. We also have a green bin that is collected once a month free of charge. As Senator Kitt said, in several parts of the country waste collection has been privatised. In County Wicklow special bags are sold in local shops and the price of the bag includes the cost of collecting the refuse. The company collecting the rubbish only picks up its own bags and ignores anything else. This system has an inbuilt incentive to use it sparingly. Every time someone uses a bag, he or she pays for it. In Wicklow each bag costs €1.50 to €2, so the more rubbish someone puts out in these bags, the more he or she has to pay. More importantly, the less rubbish someone puts out, the less he or she pays.
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