Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 16 November 2023
13. Deputy Paul Murphy asked the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications whether he supports taking waste collection back into public ownership to ensure better environmental management of waste; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [50236/23]
View answerThe decision to privatise the bin service and charge for all forms of waste management, including recycling and composting, has been an unmitigated disaster from an environmental and cost-of-living standpoint. Will the Minister now commit to legislation to take waste collection back into public ownership?
Local authorities are responsible for municipal waste collection and waste management planning within their functional areas. It is open to any local authority to re-enter the waste collection market as direct service providers if it so chooses, either alongside existing permitted service providers or subject to making arrangements to replace those providers. Under section 60(3) of the Waste Management Act 1996, as Minister, I am precluded from exercising any power or control in relation to the performance by a local authority, in particular circumstances, of a statutory function vested in it.
The section on gov.ie on the structure of the household waste collection market gives an analysis of the impacts of moving from side-by-side competition to a franchise market structure. It should be noted this study does not take account of the costs associated with local authorities acquiring existing customer share or those associated with investing in the necessary collection infrastructure or staff costs.
I do not know if anyone has told the Minister this before, but he is in the Government so he can change the law. There is a majority in the Dáil. It can never be an answer to a question to say something cannot be done because it is not in the law. Evidently, the law can be changed and it needs to be changed to provide for public ownership and the re-municipalisation of waste collection throughout the country.
The statistics speak for themselves. According to the EPA, the municipal waste generation trend in quantity terms is going in the wrong direction and increasing steadily. Recycling levels have plateaued since 2010, at 41%, well below the EU average of 49% and below the EU target for Ireland of 55%, which is supposed to be reached by 2025. In Germany, where waste collection is municipalised, 70% is recycled. The privatisation of the bin service, which the socialist left were the only ones to fight tooth and nail against in the early 2000s, is to blame for the fact that one third of Irish households still do not have a brown bin despite this being an EU requirement for the end of this year.
The Deputy is right. In government, we can pass legislation, as could this House. This House, in the end, is the final arbiter. We have to have the numbers in the House. That is our democratic system.
We have a waste action plan containing some 200 actions, and I see that as a central focus of what I and my colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Ossian Smyth, want to deliver. As the Deputy says, we need to dramatically enhance our recycling levels, reduce the amount of waste and create a more circular economy. That is what those 200 actions do. It emphasises a polluter pays and producer responsibility in a variety of different measures. The most totemic will be the introduction of the deposit refund scheme in the next two or three months. There are a range of other measures, particularly with the business community, placing the responsibility on it to reduce waste.
Our efforts and key focus are on those 200 actions. There is nothing stopping local authorities coming back into the sector. I have yet to meet a local authority that wants to do so. I have spoken to every single council in the country about a variety of environmental and other issues and they are not coming back to me saying they want to see a transfer back towards a municipal-led model.
Part of the problem is we have disempowered local authorities and we still have councils where councillors vote consistently to lower property taxes. We could actually start thinking about reversing that, strengthening local authorities and building up local government. Household and other charges over the years have become so politically unpalatable that they have undermined local government and the ability for us to take the sort of a action the Deputy refers to regarding changing our waste management system.
I am not sure if the Minister agrees or disagrees that the privatisation of waste collection has been a disaster. It has been a disaster for households faced with bills that go up and up, north of €300 now, while the likes of Greyhound, Panda and City Bin are making millions of euro in profits and are domiciled offshore so that they do not have to pay any tax on it. It has also been a disaster in terms of reducing the amount of waste we are collecting and increasing the percentage of that waste that gets recycled.
If we are serious about reducing waste, and that is the main thing we need to do, we need a mind shift away from blaming ordinary people, who have no choice about much of the packaging they get, and going to the root cause, which is the polluters. These are not ordinary households in the main but the big businesses that produce all the packaging to make their lives easier and to make their production processes simpler, cheaper and faster. This means bans on unnecessary and non-recyclable packaging and financial penalties to force companies to pay the full cost of recycling the waste they produce.
Momentum is building for the re-municipalisation of waste collection. I commend the work of councillors on Dublin City Council. My colleague Daithí Doolan has been working with unions. They have a working group to identify the barriers to this and they gave a presentation in the audiovisual room. We have now established an Oireachtas cross-party working group on the re-municipalisation of waste. There needs to be focus on the barriers to this. The climate committee can do a job of work on it, but the Government should grasp the opportunity and bring these services back in to public ownership.
One of the things I am most proud of was to be a councillor on Dublin City Council for six years, from 1997 to 2002.
In those years, as I remember, there were very lengthy debates about waste management, bin collection and bin services. Councillors sometimes have a hard decision because the gallery is right behind them rather than at a distance. I remember at the time taking a difficult decision in favour of the expansion of our bin service to include a brown bin and a green bin, as well as a black bin. Various parties there opposed it at every turn and various other people said that it would never work, that people would never do it and that Irish people do not like recycling and are not up to it. I have found that sometimes you can deliver things in politics. One of my proudest moments is that we actually got that through and delivered green bins and brown bins. Now, we need to go further in a variety of different ways.
A third of households do not have brown bins.
We need to do that with funding, first and foremost. If we could sit down and agree funding mechanisms for local authorities based on sustainable long-term commitments, that would make very real the people's ambitions for whatever new services we want to see local authorities delivering.
