FG & Labour announce Householders to Pay for Recycling

national | environment | news report Monday February 01, 2016 22:44 by T

Incentive to Recycle will go down. Material will be mixed with general waste and sent to new Dublin incinerator

If there was ever a way to discourage recycling it is to charge for it. But there is more to this story. Way back during the Bin Tax campaign it was said that the original plan was to charge for recycling and all along the plan was to send most of the recycling material like paper, cardboard and plastic to feed the huge incinerator then planned for Dublin.

This €600 million incinerator is now being built after it was forced on the people of Dublin by the former chairman of Dublin City Council John Tierney in the most undemocratic and secretive way and completely against all the councillors. This incinerator needs to be fed huge amounts of burnable material to keep it 'profitable'. It was sized for 600,000 tonnes which is more than all waste from Dublin. Tierney of course signed a lucrative deal with the incinerator operators Covanta whereby the council will make up the gap financially if they don't get enough material to feed into the monster. Now the dots have joined up and we can be sure that this announcement to start charging for recycling in July 2016 is very much connected with this since the incinerator will start operating early in 2017.

The Sunday Business Post is reporting that Environment Minister Alan Kelly has signed off on plans to have people pay for every kilo of waste they produce - including the contents of their green bins.

The Sunday Business Post has listed the costs at 11% per lift for general waste, 6% for brown bins and green bins at 2% but you can be sure once they start charging these figures will change a lot and householders will be paying anything from €100 upwards extra on their bills. Notice the way there is no effort to put a tax on excessive packaging. The reason is that might reduce the steady stream of cardboard and plastic which we pay for in the goods and now will pay for in the disposal so that the incinerator has something to feed it with.

How it will work though is that there will be zero incentive for people to put recycleables into separate green bins and it will start to rapidly get mixed in with the regular waste. Later on up the road, perhaps a few years, they will withdraw the green bin eventually, but because the recycleables will be soiled with general waste, then they will complain that they can't sell it to the regular paper & cardboard and plastic recyclers BUT the new incinerator down in Ringsend will take it because they will just burn it anyhow since purity of material is not important but is for recycling. Covanta -the incinerator owner won't care whether it is soiled or not. In fact it keeps it out of the recycling market and means they will get it for next to nothing.

Hence it is clear how the effects of charging will change the handling and all the incentives will change so as to direct all the recycleables to the incinerator.

Since glass and metals are of no use to the incinerator, we may see the government/council keep the recycling facilities for these but we can be sure that the existing recycleable facilities dealing with these will be discouraged too.

This had always been the plan but at the time of the Bin Tax campaign over 10 years ago, the government promoted the idea the introduction of Bin Charges was about saving the environment and therefore at that time they couldn't be seen to support charging for recycling. So they just waited. The government then was FF. This time it is FG & Labour. As we know there is little difference between them and they are both right-wing, anti-environment, anti-people, pro-business political parties.

This news represents the final chapter and final defeat of the anti Bin Charges campaign, since the waivers are long gone and now all reasons the Greens urged people to support Bin Charges are gone. The Greens were completely duped.

It should be clear now that this was about privatisatising yet another public service, had nothing to do with protecting the environment and given no effort has ever been made to reduce packaging, it was about guaranteeing a steady supply of materials to the waste and incinerator business with the ordinary folks paying for everything in the middle.