Just to clarrify where the IWMA €2 billion number derives from.

as our analysis base we used the public accounts posted on the web for the combined four councils. Based on what the combined entities collect in waste charges from Households and Commercial enterprises and compare to what it costs them to run this service - in 2009 they have a deficit of approx €59 million and in 2010 they predict to have a deficit of €63 million. These numbers do not include costs / charges for street sweeping or litter managment or enfocrcemnt issues which we all undersatnd as public service items. So the defecit referred to only relates to ‘commercial waste activities’ or sectors where the councils compete against commercial operators. Interestingly most of this deficit relates to excessive costs for landfill mgt that should have been well catered for over the the full life of the facilities. Based on loosing this amount of money on-going for the next 25 years, plus €120 million commited to date in Poolbeg and finally adding in an estimate €10 - €20 million as the annual deficit due to being unable to meet the Put-or-pay clause you arrive at a potential €2 billion, cost to the tax payer / rate payer.

And right now I cannot see any reason why our predictions may be any more incorrect then yours!

@Conor If your figures are right, and you make a strong case, Richard is correct in saying you should try to publish them. Waste management is very important and critical analysis is needed to minimise policy mistakes (directed at the gov. not Richard) and ill-judged decisions.

Revised EPA waste licences apply to landfills

True, but a model that does not predict trends correctly should tell the researcher there is something wrong with their model or assumptions. Particularly if the model gives time derivatives of the wrong sign; it should set off alarm bells. Empirical observations will always trump models and approximations.

On a different note, it is great to see you highlighting inconsistencies and down right idiocies in some of the green’s policies.

I addressed your issue with directing waste and BMW in previous threads: There are economies of vertical integration. The Landfill directive applies to landfills.

You said on a related thread that you supported (the law doesn’t) the ability of the LA’s to direct waste collected by private waste companies to a particular facility under certain circumstances. What circumstances/conditions would these be? Can you please make some attempt to engage in meaningful debate other than dismissing the topic?

We had this discussion with regard projected waste growth back in March (31st) where I referenced and quoted the SLR report. This was your response
”@Sam
SLR is just wrong about the assumptions in ISus and how it is used”

And that was that,

I then made my usuall arguments about why the BWM targets are not as problematic as many think to which you replied
”@Sam
There are policy aspirations, as always, but the only policy in place, at present, to make a serious dent in BMW-to-landfill is the incinerators”

Then again you did post this on the 1st of April

I can’t see this link between GDP and waste growth that the ERSI see. How, for example, will the increase in the value of pharma/chem and food exports from Irleand (that may cause GDP growth) result in people producing more waste. Populatoin growth and disposable income are more relevant to waste growth, and if the ERSI think these will grow by 3-4% per annum between 2012-2025 they are seriously deluded.

Anyway, it’s a mute point, because I wouldn’t trust the ERSI’s GDP forecaste anyway. I have no formal training in economics, and I could see the bubble was going to burst back in 2007.

As for the BMW landfill targets I have already explained on a related thread that the EPA are capping the BMW going to landfills by ammending there licences.

With regard biological treatment capacity Conor, you’re forgeting to mention numerous other plants that are in the process of animal by-products validation or are just completing construction/expansion such as OD recycling, Barna, Enrich, Waddocks, McGills, Miltown. This capacity will be on stream in next few months. These coupled with the ones you mentioned mean their could even be excess capacity, and as you say if not additional capacity can be brought on stream very quickly.
Right now there is plenty of capacity which is evidenced by the fact that average gate fees have fallen from about €80 per tonne to €65 per tonne or so in the last 18 months.

I should have chosen my words more carefully. Your model has complicated workings and my comments related to the conclusions rather than the workings. You have projected GDP growth of 3% to 4% per annum from 2012 onwards and your forecast for household waste growth is between 3% and 4% per annum from 2012 to 2025.

Household waste generated in Ireland in 2003 was 1,704,844 tonnes. In 2008, the figure was 1,677,338 tonnes. It’ll be lower again in 2009 and 2010. If you look at the trend from 2002 you should flatten out 2006 as this was an anomolous year. The trend was as follows:

2002-2003 +1.5%
2003-2004 +1.4%
2004-2005 +1.1%
2005-2007 +0.8% (over 2 years)
2007-2008 -5.1%

If you consider that these growth rates were experienced during a period of boom and associated major immigration and the National Waste Prevention Programme was only getting started, how can you expect growth rates of 3% to 4% in the future?

“The EU average growth in household waste over the past c.10 years has been 0.4% per annum.” So? Our model is calibrated to data from Ireland.

Your model has ignored the National Waste Prevention Programme and has assumed that household waste will grow in line with GDP. I suggest that one is an oversight and the other is contrary to overwhelming evidence from Ireland and Europe.

The National Strategy on Biodegradable Waste 2006 assumed that the NWPP will impact on waste arisings by between 3% and 6%.

The EU average growth in household waste over the past c.10 years has been 0.4% per annum. Your projection is 9 to 10 times higher. This is not a superficial observation.

If I recall correctly, Gorecki’s Addendum stated quite arrogantly that our analysis was ‘inferior’ to the ESRI’s model. Our analysis was based on evidence rather than theory and your ISus model contradicts the evidence.

In 2008, you predicted that MSW arisings in Ireland would rise by c.3.5% that year. In 2009, you revised this downward to growth of 1.2%. the actual figure recorded later that year was -5.1%. You were wrong by 6.3%, despite the fact that you were looking back at the previous year. How can you be so arrogant about your future projections.

You may have noticed that your client, DCC, decided not to use your projections in the 2009 Annual Progress Report for the Dublin Regional Waste Plan, published in January 2010. They used growth rates for household waste that were about half of your projected growth rates, when using your data would have better suited their case. RPS produced that document, so you now have RPS, SLR and Eunomia all recognising that the ESRI’s projections are over-blown. It’s not just me that has found fault with your analysis, it’s three of the biggest waste management consultancy companies in the UK and Ireland.

You still haven’t addressed the “Put or Pay” clause in this contract.

A commercially viable entity should not need this.

Let Covanta compete for the waste and not sign up taxpayers or DCC for any possible shortfalls that arise.

If they remove this clause then i’d go and cheerlead the project.

Regards,

Tim

There is a great opportunity for you here. We just had two papers published in the international literature. Showing us wrong is a sure publication.

Your household waste growth projections for Ireland are between 3% and 4% per annum after 2012, when the equivalent figure was 0.65% during the Celtic Tiger boom years. The EU average for household waste growth over the last few years was 0.4%. I have no faith in your model and consequently no faith in your expertise in the area of wastes management.

According to the EPA, we were 280,000 t/a short of the 2010 Landfill Directive target in 2008 and the brown bin alone is likely to bridge that gap by next year. In addition, waste volumes have fallen by somewhere between 10 and 30% since 2007. If we miss the target this year, it won’t be by much. We should certainly meet it next year and in 2012, with the introduction of Indaver’s 200,000t/a incinerator at Carranstown and the development of up to 500,000t/a capacity for Refuse Derived Fuel capacity at six existing Mechanical Treatment plants (Panda, Greenstar, Thorntons, Mr. Binman, Greyhound and Oxigen) and at least one new one (AES).

You state that the alternatives take a long time to build, but you are not close enough to the waste sector to see that the alternatives have been progressing quietly in the background. The companies that I mentioned above will have 340,000 t/a RDF production capacity available this year. with at least a further 160,000 t/a to follow over the next 2 to 3 years. With the collapse in construction, C&D waste processing capacity requirements have reduced dramatically and this has freed up space and equipment at existing facilities for MBT operations. Hence the rapid growth in RDF production capacity.

The development of biological treatment capacity is also progressing well and while not as quick as RDF production, it’s a lot quicker than development of new incinerators. For example, Acorn Recycling built a 45,000 t/a composting plant in Tipperary with a construction period of 10 months. Panda, Greenstar, Thorntons, AES, Mr. Binman and many others have planning permission for additional biological treatment capacity and I expect that these plants will be ready before the Poolbeg Incinerator is constructed.

I don’t wish to sound anti-incineration. I work for a consultancy that supports many incineration developments around the world and the technology is superior in some ways to the alternatives, but inferior in other ways. I have also carried out consultancy work for the IWMA in relation to the Poolbeg project, but the points above are factual rather than my opinion.

In conclusion, Ireland can comply with the Landfill Directive targets without Poolbeg, but personally I believe that a properly sized Poolbeg incinerator developed on a purely merchant basis is the best option for the country. A smaller plant (200Kt/a-300kt/a)without a ‘put-or-pay’ clause would compete fairly with the alternatives and offer no threat to recycling and no threat to the ratepayers in Dublin and the taxpayers of Ireland.

If DCC plough on out of pure stubborness, they are condemning Dublin to 25 years of losses, currently running at €62m per annum and likely to rise under the Covanta contract. I’m surprised that the ESRI are so unconcerned about this risk of €2bn losses over the 25 years of the contract.

“The Poolbeg incinerator contract was signed and became operative on 4 September 2007.

“It specifies that certain conditions must be met within a 36-month period.

“If these conditions have not been met, the contract stipulates, the ‘parties may exercise their rights to terminate this agreement’.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the council is the offending party here - state intervention has meant that it can’t uphold its end of the contract. Why, then, would Covanta be willing to dissolve the contract on terms overwhelmingly beneficial to the council?

I quote from that redoubtable organ, the South Wales Echo:

In 2003 Covanta was fined $14,695 by Virginia for emitting excessive amounts of carbon monoxide from its plant at Alexandria, and for failing to submit environmental reports. In New Jersey Covanta has been repeatedly fined for releasing excessive amounts of dioxin and other toxic emissions. Massachusetts cited Covanta Energy for illegal emissions of toxic air pollutants. In October 2008 Covanta was fined $45,600 for toxic nickel emissions from a municipal waste incinerator in Pennsylvania. And in the early 1990s the city of Indianapolis, Indiana agreed a “consent decree” with Ogden Martin under which the company agreed to pay $25,000 for failing the state’s particulate emissions standards.

The Aarhus convention is a worthy statute, but we in Ireland also have a fine (and fined) tradition of not implementing European environmental law, until dragged into court. Ireland and Switzerland were among the last to ratify it in Europe, and I am not aware of any real-time data feeds to which, we, the public have access. For instance water quality results have to be dug for in county council web sites and are several weeks out of date before they see the light of day. Perhaps Mr. Tol can point me to an example of a publicly accessible real-or-near-real-time feed.

Don’t hold your breath, Mr. Tol never defends his interventions.

A charming invitation to debate, even if “troll” doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means.

Might I invite you in turn to take a look back at this earlier article and respond to the questions on how you were able to make such definitive assertions on the decision of the Competition Authority?