Just bin Alan Kelly

ALAN Kelly plans to introduce a charge for the Green Recycling bins and claims that nearly 90% of homes will pay less. Who does he think he is kidding? According to the new guidelines, the cost of having a green bin will be 2c per kg, but this is the expected minimum price.

Companies, though, can charge what they like and we all know what way those charges will go as the rate for the green bin is lower than the brown or black bins (6c brown 11c black per kg).

Some people may just dump all waste in the green bin!

Thankfully, there is an election SO, Alan Kelly is introducing pay-by-weight for domestic bins, an initiative that will ‘save people money’ – a real departure from the norm coming from the Coalition that has consistently done the opposite throughout its term of office.

Mr Kelly doesn’t know what waste disposal actually involves and won’t listen to those who do. Take, as always, the simplistic solution and then wonder why it all descends into chaos, as this latest ‘initiative’ will do (just as Irish Water, which he was supposed to have sorted, has done).

After 35 years of running waste disposal technology companies and designing new processes for converting wastes into new products, I dare to suggest I might know more than Alan Kelly (Heaven forbid!).

So the first point: the Holy Grail of recycling only has any merit if it creates environmental benefit, and collecting glass in bottle banks and then shipping the contents to the UK in trucks and ferries can easily consume more fossil fuels than the materials are worth before someone is paid to take them. Same with paper and cardboard, and all of the other things that householders faithfully put in their green bins – where do those materials go, at what cost to the environment?

Of course, he can lean on the waste recycling firms that collect the bins, but all they can do is separate materials. They don’t attempt to do anything more with them than try to sell them on to an overseas reprocessor at less than the cost of collection – a deficit that is dealt with by bin charges that can only escalate under new government initiatives.

So the second point: the Irish Daily Mail has published a very useful guide on how to minimise pay-by-weight charges, including a compost heap in the garden to avoid brown bin charges. Fine, unless you live in a tower block in Dublin city or a flat in Limerick.

Not every tenant will welcome a compost heap on the balcony above and, anyway, a window box can only use so much compost.

Third point: Exactly how will the new charges by weight be applied to the residents of tower blocks or blocks of flats, when everything either goes down a chute or into a communal bin?

Ah! A standard charge no doubt, levied upon the management com- pany with a resulting charge to each tenant who might have moved out last week. Even the continuing resident in those cases will pay no more for his pollution of the environment than his elderly neighbour who lives alone and throws nothing away. Shades of Irish Water perhaps?

Fourth point: what is the most significant pollutant that cannot be recycled? Expanded polystyrene packaging that protects everything from the pork chop from Tesco to the DVD player bought from PC World. The waste collection firms don’t want to ever encounter it because its volume is many times its mass, so it must be placed in the grey (black) bin for disposal — to where? This material is appearing all over the world, in oceans and in fish and birds and in floating islands in the Pacific and Caribbean, and it is just one of many of the nonrecyclable materials.

So what to do about that Mister Kelly if you can find time from your schedule of imposing new charges?

Try looking it up on the internet where you might discover what other countries are doing about such issues and try to understand how the environment works before you try to regulate it!

With the coming election, we’ll be promised Nirvana where the fields are populated with dancing maidens, only to find we’ve yet another wasteland created by the Alan Kellys of this world, all in our best interests and at our cost without benefit.

ANTHONY MANSER, Faithlegg, Co. Waterford.