Thank you, Chairman, for inviting the Environmental Protection Agency to meet this committee. We have previously made presentations to this committee on the EPA's wider role regarding environmental protection issues. We are, as ever, happy to assist the committee in its work.
We are aware that the committee has had a number of presentations about the collection of waste and waste markets in general from Repak, which had commissioned a report from Peter Bacon and Associates, and from the Irish Waste Management Association, and that officials from the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government have also appeared before this committee in recent weeks. The EPA has recently published its annual National Waste Report for the year 2007. In discussion with the clerk to the committee in advance of today's meeting we suggested that the EPA would briefly present the main findings of that report and discuss the issue of packaging waste in that context. With your permission, Chairman, that is what I propose to do. We will be more than happy to answer any questions the committee might have and, if either I or my colleagues are unable to provide specific answers today, I will arrange for the relevant information to be forwarded to the committee.
The Environmental Protection Agency is an independent statutory body, established in 1993 under the Environmental Protection Agency Act 1992, with a wide range of responsibilities including regulation of large-scale industrial and waste facilities, monitoring and reporting on the state of the environment, overseeing local authorities' environmental responsibilities, co-ordinating environmental research in Ireland, promoting resource efficiency and regulating Ireland's greenhouse gas emissions. The work of the EPA is carried out by its four offices, the Office of Environmental Enforcement, the Office of Climate, Licensing and Resource Use which is represented today by my two colleagues, the Office of Environmental Assessment and an Office of Communications and Corporate Services.
The EPA has specific roles with regard to municipal waste which are set out in an appendix to this document. I did not want to make the presentation too long so that is set out in the appendix. These roles include: waste licensing and permitting; co-ordination of the national waste prevention programme; preparation of a national hazardous waste management plan; and enforcement roles under a number of regulations concerning, for example, waste from electrical and electronic equipment known as the WEEE regulations, and restriction on use of hazardous substances under the RoHS regulations, waste batteries and accumulators, and other hazardous substances product restrictions. In general, local authorities may also have specific enforcement roles under these and other waste management regulations. In addition, the EPA's Office of Environmental Enforcement, OEE, has a supervisory role in terms of the environmental protection activities of local authorities.
I will now speak about the national waste report recently published and which members have a copy of. The EPA is responsible for producing national statistics on waste in the Republic of Ireland. The objective of producing an annual national waste report is to present the most up-to-date available information on waste generation and management, as reported to the EPA. The national waste report enables all stakeholders in waste management to make informed decisions and to fulfil national and EU reporting in relation to binding obligations.
Waste data for the report is collected from waste operators, local authorities, industry and other bodies as necessary, reporting waste information for 2007, and primarily deals with municipal waste, which is broadly defined as all household, commercial and non-process industrial waste. The report shows that in 2007 the generation of municipal waste increased by only 0.4% on 2006 to approximately 3,397,683 tonnes following an 11% increase in the previous year, that recycling of municipal waste increased by 3.6% to an overall rate of 36.5% and that disposal of municipal waste to landfill increased by 1.7%. I apologise for the number of statistics and percentages in the report but unfortunately that is the nature of a report such as this. The report also highlights that the quantity of biodegradable waste to landfill increased by 5% to roughly 1,485,968 tonnes and that less than 9% of organic wastes were recovered. Recycling of household waste increased by 8% to 26% and recycling of packaging waste increased by 14% to 63.5%. A total of approximately 50,626 tonnes of waste from electrical and electronic equipment was reported to have been collected for recycling including 8.7 kg per capita of household waste from electrical and electronic equipment. That excludes business waste from electrical and electronic equipment.
With regard to waste collection, 17 local authorities provided a kerbside waste collection service for householders, collecting 48% of household waste. Private sector operators collected the remaining 52%. In 2007, the number of civic amenity sites increased to 90 and the number of bring banks increased to 1,960. Finally, a total of 29 active landfills accepted municipal waste.
The conclusions of the national waste report were as follows: the overall generation of municipal waste did not increase appreciably in 2007, in contrast to 2006; recycling rates generally remained steady with good progress reported in regard to packaging; the diversion of very large quantities of food waste from landfill is a priority that must be addressed as a matter of urgency if Ireland is to meet binding targets under the landfill directive, and failure to meet these targets could result in daily fines; and the level of waste reported in 2007, allied with the need for businesses to reduce costs in 2009, reflects the need for continued support for resource conservation initiatives in regard to waste, water and energy, such as the national waste prevention programme administered by the EPA.
The report also identified the following priority actions which it will be noted are largely in the area of biodegradable waste management: putting in place the services required for the separate collection of organic, particularly food, waste at households and commercial premises; ensuring there is adequate infrastructure to treat the very large amounts of organic, particularly food, waste that must be collected separately and diverted from landfill; developing outlets for the products of such treatment; making regulations and by-laws that can be used to enforce the segregation and separate collection of food waste at household and commercial premises; and delivering the new waste policy on foot of the international review of waste management as quickly as possible to provide certainty and to allow for accelerated investment programmes that are necessary if organic waste is to be treated and landfill avoided.
It will be seen that the priority has been on diverting organic waste from landfill and trying to achieve our targets under the landfill directive. Therefore, although significant progress has been made in managing waste in Ireland, there are still some major challenges to be addressed in managing our waste and meeting Ireland's commitments regarding biodegradable waste in particular. In addition, in a time of increasingly constrained resources, fundamental issues need to be addressed in terms of establishing sustainable resource use in all sectors of the world market economy.
I now turn to the specific issue of packaging waste, which the committee had asked us to address. The packaging directive, Directive 94/62/EC, sets recovery and recycling targets for packaging waste to be achieved by Ireland. The targets have been transposed in the Waste Management (Packaging) Regulations 2007. To date, all targets have been achieved. In 2001, 25.3% of packaging waste was recycled, exceeding the 25% target for that year, and in 2005, 59% of packaging waste was recycled, exceeding the 50% target set for that year. The next applicable national target is for 2008 and at least 60% of packaging waste must be recovered, with at least 55% recovered by recycling. While this target was originally set for 2011 in the packaging directive, the 2007 national regulations brought this target forward to 2008 as a result of targets being exceeded in earlier years.
With regard to packaging waste, the national waste report for 2007 shows that recycling of packaging waste increased by almost 14% from 589,519 tonnes in 2006 to 671,630 tonnes in 2007, representing a recovery rate of 63.6% and exceeding the national target. This was the largest annual increase in packaging waste recycling since 2003.
Municipal waste composition surveys conducted by the EPA in 2008 found that the percentage of packaging in black bin waste had decreased. This resulted in a reduction of over 50,000 tonnes in the calculated quantity of packaging going to landfill. Recovery of packaging wood waste in Ireland was at 98.8%, which is extremely high, and paper and cardboard packaging was at 77%, which is also high. Recovery of aluminium and plastic packaging were at the lowest rates at 26% and 22%, respectively. The large increase in recycling in 2007 and the reduced landfill resulted in packaging recovery growing from 57.3% in 2006 to 63.6% in 2007.
There are two graphs. Figure 1 shows the growth in packaging waste recycling from 2001 to 2007 from a base of just over 200,000 tonnes to the almost 700,000 tonnes achieved in 2007, with steady year-on-year growth. Figure 2 shows how this growth in recycling of packaging waste has resulted in an increase in the recovery rate of packaging waste from 25% in 2001 to 63.6% in 2007, exceeding Ireland's 2008 target of 60%.
With regard to obligations under the Waste Management (Packaging) Regulations, the national waste report includes the results of the first survey of packaging self-compliers reported in local authority areas. The Chairman may remember that when we appeared before this committee last year, he asked me a question on this issue and I undertook to include such detail in our survey this year for the local authorities. This is the first time we have done this so we have just preliminary results.
In 2007, as will be seen in the report, the results indicated a reported 56,000 tonnes of packaging placed on the market by self-compliers. This survey will be repeated annually and will be developed and refined to ensure that the information received is as comprehensive as possible. We will also be passing on the information we receive in that survey to our colleagues in the Office of Environmental Enforcement to ensure we get action on that score. It should be noted that the local authorities are the competent authorities for the enforcement of these regulations in their functional areas.
I will move to recycling markets and, while the EPA does not have a huge role in the economics of this issue, we have included a section on it. A significant collapse of prices in the recyclate market occurred during 2008. The Bacon report commissioned by Repak in November 2008 examines the impact of this recent price collapse in markets for recyclate materials and proposes some interventions. In general, the recommendations are directed at the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, its Minister and the Government in general. In response to the collapse in prices, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government established an action group on recyclates in November 2008. The EPA participated in this group at the request of the Department.
In particular, the EPA was asked to consider how best to provide for interim storage of collected materials in the short term. The agency recognised the difficulties facing EPA licensees and committed to work with them on this issue. It was agreed that waste licensees would apply for technical amendments of EPA licences as necessary to permit storage of processed non-leachate non-nuisance forming dry recyclables, for example, plastics and metal cans, on their licensed site for extended periods. The external storage would be permitted on condition that it did not result in a deterioration of the recycling potential of processed material. No applications have been received by us to date.
The EPA also committed to consider accommodating, by technical amendment or review of licences, the use of consented landfill void for medium to long-term storage of pre-processed non-leachate non-nuisance forming dry recyclables, such as plastics and metal cans. The recyclables would be isolated from other wastes to ensure contaminant-free status and thereby re-exportability if markets improved. The EPA committed to prioritise any application for any licence in respect of a storage depot for dry recyclables. No applications have been received to date.
Mindful of the difficult market conditions and the environmental risk profile for dry recyclable storage facilities, the EPA committed to actively consider any application for a waiver or refund in respect of licence application fees, although as we did not receive any applications, that did not arise. In addition, the EPA communicated with local authority enforcement personnel, via the EPA environmental enforcement network, to apprise them of the emerging storage crisis. This apprisal also encouraged the local authorities to be flexible and pragmatic in regard to enforcement issues for non-polluting dry recyclables storage, post processing. Since then, as has been outlined in the submission from the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, there has been some easing of the situation, with evidence from the waste management industry and from Repak that markets have recovered somewhat and that material is beginning to move again. From an EPA perspective, the fact that no applications for temporary or emergency storage have been received would support this evidence. However, the crisis is not resolved and has shown up some of the underlying difficulties associated with the long-term commitment to achieving recycling targets, and doing this at reasonable cost. The EPA will continue to participate with all the relevant players in the action group on recyclates and any other such groups and will make its expertise available where appropriate.
I am happy to try to answer any questions the Chairman or members may have.
