I will deal with the question of how we can avoid such a crisis happening again. As Ms Keaney mentioned, I am managing director of Indaver Ireland. The Indaver Group is an integrated waste management company handling almost 2 million tonnes waste per year in a range of activities from waste prevention, recycling, composting and waste-to-energy plants to landfill. However, our core business is in waste-to-energy. The ownership of Indaver might be of interest to the committee. More than 90% of it is owned by municipalities and local authorities in Belgium and Holland. Our roots are very much in the local authority world, particularly the waste management section of it.
We have assembled a national and international team of respected experts to build a facility costing €130 million in County Meath which will be operational from the start of 2011. Our Meath facility will manage 200,000 tonnes of residual waste per annum and generate enough energy to meet the needs of 20,000 homes, the equivalent of every home in Navan and Drogheda. Some 300 people will be employed during the construction phase in Meath, with 60 full-time jobs in place when operational.
In addition to Meath, we have submitted plans to build a waste-to-energy facility in County Cork which, when operational, will be positioned to supply energy to the local industrial companies that are the main employers in the region. This investment will create up to 400 construction jobs and a further 50 full-time jobs. Our local experience, combined with the European expertise of our parent company, gives us an insight and perspective on the recent pork crisis.
As CEWEP has detailed, the pork crisis is the fifth example of inappropriate recycling in recent times. Every time the effect was profound and every time we united in our response, but every time another crisis followed. Clearly, lessons are not being learned. Even before this committee has got to the bottom of the most recent crisis, Government policy is being advanced that may result in Ireland experiencing further food crises.
I refer to the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government's stated policy of prioritising mechanical biological treatment, MBT, in his waste management policy. MBT is a pre-treatment technology, which partially treats household and commercial waste by mechanically removing some parts and biologically treating others so that outputs are reduced and are more suitable for certain uses. A typical MBT plant is shown in the diagram. In a typical MBT plant, municipal solid waste, MSW, is separated out using mechanical and biological treatment. About 30% of what comes in is driven off in water vapour and carbon dioxide. Just under 40% of it will be generated as a fuel which can go either to incineration plants or cement kilns.
What I wish to bring to the committee's attention today is the 30% that is produced as a compost, and about 3% is recovered as metals. Therefore, very little recycling actually takes place in an MBT facility unless one uses compost. That is what we want to warn the committee and the public about.
As this diagram shows, the two main outputs of an MBT facility are fuel, which can either go to a cement kiln or an incinerator, and a biologically-treated compost-like output, which the Minister proposes would be used as a soil conditioner or fertiliser to be spread on the land.
Let us imagine the pork crisis happening again, but this time when the Minister's new MBT-centred waste management policy was in place. What would have happened? The start would have been the same. The Government, on the advice of the authorities, would have instructed the removal and destruction of all pork products. As before, the pork products from household fridges and the commercial chain would have been disposed of in black bins and skips. However, the next step is where, under the Minister's MBT-led strategy, new problems would have emerged. Essentially, we would have nowhere to dispose of the waste.
We could not place it in landfill because this would be against the EU landfill directive and the animal by-products regulations, where alternatives are available. The EPA also highlighted the risk of increased odour problems and the potential for contaminating landfill leachate by PCBs with this option. We could not incinerate it because of the Minister's anti-incineration policy. We could not MBT it because the biological processes involved in MBT do not reach temperatures high enough to destroy PCB contamination. So the waste would have come out of our houses, into bins and then into an MBT plant. The PCB that was in the waste would have gone straight through the MBT plant. No technical experts in any areas claim that MBT destroys PCB — it simply does not do so. The only way one can destroy PCB is by high temperature incineration.
Rendering pork waste would also come with real complexities and costs. While identified animals and bulk pork products could be rendered, collecting and separating pork meat mixed with other black bin waste would be a logistical and expensive nightmare. Pigs that were not slaughtered and made into food products, were in fields, sheds or factories. It was easy to render them and incinerate them in cement kilns. It was an easily managed waste stream, as we would describe it. The next level, which would be food products in the large supermarkets, comprised large volumes that are easy to collect in dedicated skips. It is easy to take them to rendering plants and deal with them. The difficulty comes from the 1 million homes scattered around Ireland that all have contaminated meat products in them. How does one get hold of those? That is the difficulty. We would be in a complete limbo because all the black bins in those 1 million homes would potentially have PCB in them. One would not know which ones had PCB or which ones had not. It is a very difficult situation to deal with.
The only option open to us would be exporting it for thermal treatment, but that is too complex. Whatever about sending out dedicated streams of hazardous waste, which one can clearly get a handle on, how do we collect the 1 million bins and for what period of time do we collect them? Some people put their meat products into the bin on that Sunday morning, while others might have waited a week or a month to do so — we do not know.
Even without the introduction of PCBs into the black bin, the compost from MBT is already contaminated by other waste. Only four days before Áine Lawlor, on a special "Morning Ireland" broadcast on RTE radio, announced that all householders were to dump their contaminated pork into the black bin, the European Commission issued a paper that warned member states about the risk of soil pollution from contaminated compost. The paper stated that typical contaminants in compost from MBT plants include heavy metals, broken glass, plastic fragments and, potentially, substances like dioxins and, notably, PCBs. Four days before we had the problem here, the European Commission issued that warning to all member states. It was not linked to what happened in Ireland, it was just a coincidence, but it highlighted the matter. Whatever the committee may think our agenda is, it should certainly take note of what the European Commission said four days before the crisis hit.
The seriousness of this situation should not be underestimated. Indeed, various contributions to this committee in recent days have provided startling scenarios which we now must be mindful. One such contribution, on 15 January last, was made by Deputy Ned O'Keeffe, who raised a pertinent point for the committee's attention. He rightly warned that the next food crisis would likely involve pathogens, an infectious agent that can attack healthy animal cells. These pathogens present the same problems we face in dealing with PCB oil. Just like PCBs, not all pathogens can be destroyed using the MBT process. Some can only be safely destroyed and taken out of the food chain through incineration. One such pathogen is the BSE prion. That was what was in the meal waste that caused the problem. The only way to destroy prions is by using temperatures of over 1,000° C — in other words, by incineration or cement kilns, which is why we no longer send that material anywhere other than as a fuel source.
Our lack of adequate facilities and ill-thought out policy approach means Ireland would be exposed once more in a pathogens crisis. To summarise, not only is MBT bad in a food crisis, in that it would not have worked, but it could also be the cause of a food crisis if the compost-like output is allowed to be landspread as the Minister suggests. Fortunately, the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has already taken some steps to prevent this from happening.
The most recent guidance notes on composting and anaerobic digestion take a cautious approach to MBT and require that all facilities comply with animal by-product regulations regardless of where the outputs are sent. This approach should be encouraged and extended to any proposed application of the compost-like output to land, for reasons I have already explained.
Unless we wake up to the limitations and dangers of MBT, we will sleepwalk into another food crisis. We have got to be joined-up in our response to the pork crisis. We have got to learn that, first and foremost, we must treat waste safely. We must put in place robust regulations that force certain waste products, particularly food waste, to be handled appropriately. We simply must remove policies and technologies that leave open the possibility of contaminated waste infiltrating the food chain. We must realise the limitations and risks associated with inappropriate recycling and MBT, rather than blindly supporting these options without any regard to their potential impacts.
Unlike before, we must respond comprehensively to this food crisis to ensure it never happens again. That means a root-and-branch examination under all the headings — environment, climate change, health, agriculture, food and economics — to ensure our practices are designed to protect what we value.
A good starting point would be to reassess the policy of widespread MBT roll-out and ensure that our waste management policy structure is flexible enough to handle issues like the food crisis without posing a risk to health and the environment. Ireland faces enough domestic and international challenges without creating new problems.
We believe, therefore, that the following actions should now be taken: the MBT-centered waste management policy should be abandoned; the role of waste-to-energy in the context of inappropriate recycling should be recognised; the international waste policy review should involve consultation with the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, and other Departments, to ensure that all possible risks, like inappropriate recycling, are recognised and that waste policy is designed to avoid these risks. Therefore, we respectfully submit that the committee requests participation in the consultation or makes a submission to the review highlighting these concerns; and as previously noted, the EPA should be made responsible for licensing activities where there is a risk of contaminated food waste entering the food chain. These recommendations will help to ensure that potentially dangerous waste is kept away from the food chain.
We make these recommendations in the interest of food quality and safety, to protect the thousands of jobs and businesses that are dependent on our food sector and to show that Ireland can manage its waste in a responsible manner.
Ireland requires a robust waste management system that prevents contamination from entering the food chain and, where necessary, can respond in the case of accidental contamination. We cannot prevent the PCB contamination happening again. It was either an accident because of ignorance or it was malicious, but either way no legislation or anything else will potentially prevent it happening again. We must have a waste management system that can deal with it should it happen. This can only be achieved with an integrated waste management system that includes waste prevention, recycling, composting, waste-to-energy, MBT and landfill in line with international best practice.
We are happy to take questions or, outline further any details members would welcome.