Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and thank the Labour Party Senators for tabling this motion as part of Private Members' business. As Senator Sherlock has rightly said, the motion is the beginning of a debate on waste.

At the outset, I will state that I believe in competition. I believe in the public and the private having fair access to the market and competing. I was a county councillor for many years. Like the Minister of State, I served on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, so I know its experience of managing its waste. I spoke to numerous elected county councillors in the past week to prepare some thoughts I wanted to share here today. I found that the views were mixed and many said that waste management should be opened up to the market. It must be a fair market. Again, I take what the Senators have said, when presenting this motion, that we need regulation and a regulator. That is really important too. On the re-municipalisation of waste collection, I am not 100% sure about that. My gut instinct says that we can have partially both. I take on board what Senator Kyne said about a whole load of trucks collecting waste at different times on, say, a Thursday. Such a situation is not proper or sustainable way to manage our resources.

I also thank the Library and Research Service for preparing a note for this debate. I will not go into great detail about it because the Minister of State and every Senator can look at the note online. The note states that the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, and the Central Statistics Office collect statistics on waste management, which is extremely important. Therefore, anyone can dip into that and see the issues involved.

I draw the Minister of State's attention to the European Union (Household Food Waste and Bio-waste) (Amendment) Regulations 2023. These regulations include a number of new requirements on waste collectors and their customers. For example, there is the obligation to provide their household customers with a food waste collection service - a brown bin - from 1 January 2024.Waste collectors are now obliged to keep records of customers not availing of a food waste collection service and to make this information available to the relevant local authority if requested to do so. All householders are now obliged to segregate their food waste and either have the food waste collected by an authorised collector or compost the food waste, among other options. There are a number of issues in regard to the role of the local authority. Waste collectors are now required to provide their household customers with a garden waste collection service. This is all under the EU regulations. The requirement for segregated food and garden waste collection will divert this waste stream from landfill.

Having said that, let us look at Dublin City Council, which is closer to home, in the city where this Parliament is located. Currently, as of today, bags are still being used for waste disposal in more than 900 Dublin streets, although Dublin City Council is reviewing which streets. We now have all these collections going on in plastic bags. That is an issue.

In order to be fully informed in this debate, we must look at the end of the process and where this waste is going. Is it going to landfill or elsewhere? The four Dublin local authorities - South Dublin County Council, Fingal County Council, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council and Dublin City Council - are involved with Covanta at Poolbeg. The big issue a few years ago was whether there would be the capacity to feed the incinerator with waste, and if they would be penalised for not feeding the necessary waste. The most recent spring newsletter from 2024 has a picture of Eamon Ryan on the front of it, on a visit to the site. Covanta announced that 4 million tonnes – a milestone for the centre – of waste was put through the incinerator. We know the plans to generate heat – the spin-off of incineration. We also know that it is works best when it is mixed waste. If we are to put a policy in place for bin collection and the number of containers for waste collection at the door, we must look at what is the end result of this waste. If all this waste is going to one place, that is, for incineration, which is by far a better option than landfill, we do not need segregated waste.

The experts say that we need more incineration. Dresden has one of the finest incineration facilities in the world. There is very little byproduct of incineration but what is left – the rakings – go into concrete production. We must look at all of that. When we look at the success of the Poolbeg incinerator operator we see that there are major community initiatives. More than €1 million has been granted to local communities, so there is buy-in from them. The local authorities took a punt on this and it is working. I believe that the public and private waste companies should operate hand in hand. The system should be regulated. There should be tenders for the use and collection of waste.

Since I was elected to the Seanad I have stood up here day in and day out and argued for subsidiarity in decision-making by our 31 local authorities on how they manage their affairs. I say, yet again, that I do not want to be part of handing down a diktat to local authorities about how they manage their waste. I accept there must be an overarching policy, strict regulation and independent validation of the regulation, but let us talk to the local authorities. Let us talk to the CCMA and about the GMA to see where we can go. If it is agreed that incineration is the long-term Government policy then the mixing of waste and how it is lifted at source at doors is a key component of that bigger debate. Let us have local authorities or groups of local authorities collaborating with each other. I will finish on this point. They must be able to decide what they want to do. We are talking about giving power back to the elected members and local councils to make decisions about how they operate and manage their own waste and manage their own local authorities themselves.