Seanad debates

Tuesday, 26 July 2011

Environment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2011 [Dáil] : Committee and Remaining Stages

 

6:00 pm

Photo of David CullinaneDavid Cullinane (Sinn Fein)

This is not about me or my party speaking about big bad incinerators. I support a waste hierarchy of reduce, reuse and recycle. My point is that creating an infrastructure or network of incinerators which must be managed will mean huge associated costs of tens of millions of euros. They will then have to operate to a certain capacity to be justified economically, and this will lend itself to the Government or State agencies not putting in place resources to invest in new technologies to examine ways of diverting or recycling waste which cannot be diverted or recycled.

We accept and support moving away from landfill, but it is wrong for us to simply replace one failed waste management system, namely, landfill, with incineration. I gave a number of examples of what we should do to put in place an infrastructure. In this country, we often put the cart before the horse. Earlier, the Minister mentioned packaging and a huge amount of packaging is needlessly created and used. My party put forward a proposal that every supermarket and retail outlet should have a receptacle where people can dispose of needless packaging at source rather than having to dispose of it at home. We all know a huge amount of packaging should not be associated with many goods that are sold. Most of this is down to how goods are marketed and how people are enticed to buy them in the first place. It is not environmentally sustainable. This is an issue the Minister could examine.

The State does not have a glass recycling facility as it was closed down by the previous Government. This comes back to my point on infrastructure; we do not put in place measures to ensure we can reduce needless packaging and invest in new technology which allows us to reduce and recycle waste which at present cannot be reduced or recycled. Technology changes all the time and much work is done nationally and internationally on research and development. Ecolab and Waterford IT have done much research on how to re-use various types of waste which we see as needing to go to a landfill or an incinerator. Building incinerators which have targets to be met is wrong.

I welcome the fact that the Minister is considering new measures in areas such as packaging. I would welcome a response from him in this regard. The reason we tabled this amendment is that in five or ten years we do not want to be left with very costly monstrosities when new technology will mean less waste needs to go to incinerators.

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