Ulick Burke (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and the opportunity to contribute to this debate. We are all aware that over the past four or five years various local authorities throughout the country have adopted waste management plans with two priorities. These are the provision of landfill sites in practically every county and the proposal to have incinerators throughout the country. The reports prepared for the local authorities have one common ingredient. They were practically all produced by the consultancy MC O'Sullivan. Unfortunately what was provided for one county was replicated in most other counties.

Most local authorities are trapped into a policy of landfill and incineration. To keep what is known as a "written balance" we have the concepts of reuse, recover and recycle but the input is, with a few exceptions, minimal. Galway city has set an example in waste management. In the first year or two it achieved 35% recycling and reuse, which has not been matched anywhere in the country.

Waste is the 21st century goldmine. As a result, various private commercial companies have entered the waste management and recovery business. The Minister is familiar with this. In County Galway private enterprise has taken over a landfill and denied pubic access to it. This is new. Local authority landfills were always open to the public and one could dispose of waste for a fee. Greenstar at Kilconnell in County Galway will not allow any private individual on site. It will only allow registered, licensed contractors.

Disposal of waste has become an expensive item in the household budget and elderly people have a particularly serious problem. If an elderly person has a bin he or she pays €360 per year regardless of whether he or she fills the bin. In the past, elderly people would save money by dumping their rubbish at the local landfill. If anybody from Clifden wanted to dispose of something he or she would have to go to the landfill in Athlone. Private, commercial facilities that have planning permission from the local authorities should allow public access to their landfill sites. They have never been asked and a good planning authority would have made it a condition of planning that they would provide a public facility.

The Minister is aware that in certain parts of the world resource recovery parks are being successfully operated. They are part of the overall waste management process in the US, Nova Scotia, New Zealand and parts of Australia. They demonstrate that one can make money out of waste. People are doing so. Many people who dealt with items such as scrap metal, which was waste to somebody, made a fortune from it. Some 90% of the material deposited in resource recovery parks can be reused, not just recycled, and manufactured into new items.

We are all aware that the Dublin Glass Bottle Company, which operated for years, went out of business because of the costs of processing recycled bottles. The use of technology enables places in the country to recycle that glass into a type of sand that can be manufactured into a host of different materials and products. It can be used for road metalling and to make tiles, flooring and other products. Ground glass is used as sand in an equine centre in Ennis, County Clare. It is the most efficient material for maintaining the exercise tracks and is ideally suited.

There was a time when various groups collected waste paper and cardboard and brought it to centres from which we were told it was taken away and recycled. However when one of those trucks was followed, it was found that it went to the Kill landfill in north Kildare. Senator Dardis is familiar with that situation. We now have uses for paper and cardboard that did not exist before. In my constituency, in Gort, County Galway, a group has formed consisting of business people in industry of all kinds, householders and an imaginative person who has put together a proposal for a resource recovery park.

However the local authority will not entertain this, even on a pilot basis. It is a pity because 94% of products imported are disposed of within six months. The packaging and other recoveries are wasteful and go to landfill. I ask the Minister to take the proposal on board. It should be supported financially as a one-off pilot scheme until the concept takes root. A site is available in Gort but because the local authority has adopted MC O'Sullivan's management plan, it finds it difficult to deviate from it. I ask the Minister to recognise this project as a pilot scheme, support it and see what can be done if people are serious about using, not necessarily recovering, all the items that go to waste, 90% of which can be recovered. If that were done there would be a new orientation in Government waste disposal policy away from the publicly disowned incineration and landfill. The people want an alternative but there is none. I ask the Minister to provide one. Everybody is concerned about the disposal of waste.

Many Senators referred to the level of consciousness of the environment among schoolchildren. The children in the schools in Gort have latched on to this subject and have said that if only somebody in authority would recognise the potential of recycling, the disposal of waste would no longer represent a cost but serve a profitable industry. I ask the Minister of State to take on board the idea behind the pilot scheme and make contact with those concerned. The personnel involved have been in contact with the Department and I ask the Minister of State to reconsider the proposal.