Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I welcome the Minister to the House and congratulate him on his announcement yesterday regarding car emissions and registration costs. I am delighted to have the opportunity of contributing on the question of waste. If he did nothing else as Minister except to take control of a number of small issues about waste, a lot could be achieved.

Before Deputy Gormley rose to the high office of Minister, he and I discussed on a number of occasions the waste miles spent in sending boatloads of our waste from western Europe to China every week. If it came down to a straight choice between incineration and sending waste to China, I would consider incineration and this is my own view.

There is no traceability of waste. People throughout Ireland are separating their waste and using their green bins. On at least four occasions over the past five years, I have tried to trace a little piece of waste but I found it quite impossible to do so. The stuff goes into one selection area, for example, in Castleisland, Farranfore or Milltown in County Kerry. Mr. Binman collects it and then someone else takes it from there to somewhere else where it is separated out — God knows how — and is then separated again into washed or unwashed categories. This system may have changed but the last time I checked, dirty plastic was sent to the Continent to be washed. We may be doing that ourselves now.

The European waste directive has ruled that waste should be disposed of as close as possible to where it is created. If we are sending hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste out of the country every year we are patently not in compliance with the directive.

I am speaking in the Minister's favour. There needs to be a straight, honest and direct discussion on what we are doing with our waste. I praised the Minister for raising the issue of waste-derived fuel, in particular, not derived by incineration but rather by natural chemical or physical methods which do not require incineration and do not create waste. A number of companies are engaged in research such as one in Dublin City University. This information should be made available to local authorities so that they can deal with this issue.

I ask the Minister to do one thing immediately. Any county or local authority which is not collecting waste on the basis of volume or weight should be fined. There are still counties which encourage people to dump all the waste they wish so long as they pay a set charge a year. The idea of an annual charge for waste collection is completely and utterly wrong. Waste collection should be made on the basis of the volume of waste or else by the number of bin lifts or some such quantifiable or measurable method. I understand this also was the view held by the Minister and the view of the previous Government. The then Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Noel Dempsey, also was of that view. I suggest the Minister should direct local authorities. An annual charge provides no encouragement to people to minimise waste and this is wrong. The argument is often made that one must not be unfair to people with large families but there is a simple way. Some people could be given a number of bin lifts for free over the year. I ask the Minister to put the boot in hard on this issue.

I have raised the issue of China hosting the Olympic Games. Dongyang is a city in China and it is the place where most European waste is dealt with. It is a place which is polluted and where people are choked and are literally suffering the hardships of coping with our waste. They are breathing it and living it. There is no regard for environmental regulations or health and safety regulations.

I understand another European regulation requires those exporting waste to be able to guarantee governments that their waste is being disposed of in a proper manner.

I will make a promise to pay my own way to Dongyang if the Minister will come with me and if we are allowed free access to see what is going on there. The people of that city are not allowed use the Internet or anything else to promote their views. They are trying to make their situation clear. We would be doing Europe a favour. We in Ireland do not want to deal with the argument about incineration and Europe does not know what to do with all its waste. We are all turning a blind eye and are filling ships with our rubbish which goes to China and chokes the people there.

I draw the Minister's attention to those who export fuel. I should say dump rather than export. While some regulations must be met and in some cases licences must be obtained, it would be good if those involved in these activities were publicly listed. Such lists are freely available, although I do not know where they can be found. I would like to know what regulations these people have to meet in order to do their business. In regard to exporting, is it not the case that waste can only be exported abroad if there is a guarantee that it is to be used for the creation of fuel? I understand European regulations provide for this.

I do not know how we are meeting requirements in this area. I asked for this debate and I could speak at length but I will confine myself to the narrow points I have raised. There is no point in telling schoolchildren to be careful with waste if they are living in a county where the system is such that no matter how much rubbish is put out at the end of a week, it is collected just because their parents pay a couple of hundred euro a year. The system should not be like that. It should operate as a cost per lift, bag, tonne or whatever. It should operate on the basis of the amount of waste created and there should be a clear understanding of this.

People should be shown the bulk of their waste, as in those food programmes when people who are overweight are shown the number of hamburgers they have eaten. People are appalled by that. I would like to see the waste that an average household creates per year for sending abroad piled up beside the house. People would then see what they were doing.

Many people are under the misapprehension that the waste they put into a green bin is cleaned away and that everything goes in one direction. When I was in primary school, a favourite essay title was "An old biro or pencil tells its own story". An old piece of rubbish might tell its own story in terms of following all the tracks it makes to reach its end usage.

I ask the Minister to deal with the China question and the matter of waste-derived fuel. I have met two groups who guarantee me that they can derive fuel from waste, and I have also seen this subject covered on a television programme. Let us do this. The Minister could give a grant to a county or a local authority for the purpose. My understanding is that there are two local authorities in the UK, one of them in London, now working on a £30 million project of this kind. It is no longer simply a project because they are now dealing with their waste in this way. There is no impact on the local environment, huge amounts of waste are being dealt with and the system is as efficient as an incinerator. It also gives fuel.

I ask the Minister whether it is possible to put a bag over every landfill in Ireland to collect the methane produced. People are not aware that the methane which is given off by landfill is 20 times more damaging to the environment than carbon. We always call such emissions carbon but a tonne of methane is equal to 20 tonnes of carbon. We are wasting fuel this in way. It is another area we should be examining. The Minister should make grants available to any county or area that puts serious effort into extracting methane from landfill. He is already doing this in a small way.

There should be a double incentive to do this in that such waste treatment would also save us money in the area of carbon credits. Some €270 million of wasteful expenditure has been set aside by the budget to buy carbon credits, a situation the Minister has criticised. I remember meeting him the night after the Budget Statement. I accept and agree that we must engage in some element of carbon credit dealing but we do not need to do as much as we are doing.

I look forward to the Minister's reply although I will be absent for a part of the debate as I have to attend a meeting. These are significant issues.