Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The handling of waste within Ireland and all other member states is subject to the provisions of the waste framework directive. The directive defines what is waste and requires that waste be managed in a manner that does not endanger human health or the environment; that does not pose a risk to water, air, soil, plants or animals; that does not cause a nuisance through noise or odours; and that does not adversely affect the countryside or places of special interest. Irish waste legislation is in accordance with the directive, and it is not open to member states to deviate unilaterally from these requirements.

The directive also lays down criteria to determine when a waste material may cease to be considered a waste and become a product or a secondary raw material. These criteria are given effect in Ireland through the end-of-waste authorisation process operated by the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, which offers a valuable route for the reuse of materials. The Waste Action Plan for a Circular Economy, published in 2020, committed to a number of measures aimed at more fully realising the potential of the end-of-waste process to contribute to material reuse and a circular economy in Ireland. In fulfilment of these commitments, the Circular Economy and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2022 contains provision for the Minister to make regulations on the charging of fees, the format of applications and accompanying information, and the circumstances in which applications may be refused or rejected. Regulations are currently being drafted in this regard and they will be put forward for public consultation in the second quarter of this year.

In parallel with these requirements, the waste framework directive also establishes a five-step waste hierarchy, setting out an order of preference for the management and disposal of waste. In setting prevention as the highest tier, the hierarchy recognises that the best way to handle waste is to prevent it. The other steps on the hierarchy, in decreasing order of desirability, are reuse, recycling, recovery and, finally, disposal.

Over the past two decades Ireland has made significant progress in driving our performance up the waste hierarchy and moving away from disposal as our primary treatment option. We have come a long way from the 2005 finding of the European Court of Justice that we were “generally and persistently” failing to meet the requirements of the waste framework directive.

The Waste Action Plan for a Circular Economy builds on this progress through some 200 measures to be delivered over the five-year lifetime of the plan. Initiatives include the recently signed regulations for incentivised charging for commercial waste, the introduction of a deposit-and-return scheme for plastic bottles and aluminium cans, and environmental levies on single-use plastic items such as disposable coffee cups, and these will all help divert material away from disposal and further up the waste hierarchy.

In addition, the action plan goes further by recognising that waste policy cannot be a narrow consideration of how to treat the waste we produce but must be broader, moving away from the unsustainable linear consumption model and towards a circular economy. The Circular Economy and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2022 gives effect to this ambition. It provides a legal framework for moving from a focus on managing waste to a much greater focus on adapting patterns of production and consumption. The Act provides for several key measures in this regard, including the circular economy strategy, the EPA’s circular economy programme, the national food loss prevention roadmap, and the circular economy fund. The overarching national objective is to reduce our generation of waste and all policy levers are being set in that direction. Ensuring we maximise the utility of existing resources, waste or not, is central to the objectives.