Tag: waste

Household waste management, episode N

The US Ambassador has again intervened in public in the row over the Poolbeg incinerator. Covanta flew some journalists to Copenhagen and they report enthusiastically about incineration there.

Covanta is concerned about the proposed (but unspecified) levies on incineration, though. They seem to accept the levies proposed by Gorecki et al and endorsed by Forfas. These levies reflect the estimated externalities of incineration, but are lower than the estimates by Eunomia. Minister Gormley, however, has proposed that levies should be unrelated to the damage caused, but should rather be set at punitive levels for undesirable technologies.

The public consultation on this has now been closed for two weeks, but the submissions have yet to be uploaded.

The Village on Poolbeg

James Nix, master’s in real estate, barrister, and unsuccessful candidate for the Green Party, has a piece in the Village: “Incinerating money: the economics of Poolbeg”.

The summary is interesting: An overwhelming success story of private sector dynamism in recycling is set to be undone by an oversized incinerator at Poolbeg – at massive cost to Dublin’s businesses. This was told to me in confidence, but it is good to see it confirmed in print. IWMA is not against incineration. Rather, they know they cannot compete. Nix champions the local companies who are fighting to maintain their grip on an undersupplied market.

Nix claims (as are others) that the Poolbeg incinerator is vertically integrated with waste collection. It is not. The incinerator will burn waste from any collector.

Michael Smith, Village editor, has a companion piece: “The Poolbeg incinerator: an essay in cynical lobbying”, in which he argues that Minister “Gormley has faced an insidious onslaught from multiple quarters” — a cabinet member victimised by the powers that be.

This was published yesterday. Smith write: “[t]he most blatantly inaccurate presumption was that emissions from the Poolbeg incinerator would be included under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. This resulted in a significant underestimate of the costs of the facility.” This is disingenuous. After inclusion of CO2 emissions, incineration externalities are still far below the Eunomia estimates.

Smith also writes that “John Gormley is […] sitting on the foreshore licence” something that the Minister has repeatedly denied (see latest example).

Poolbeg and drinking water

While I am still waiting for someone to explain to me why you do not need a foreshore license if you own land, An Bord Pleanala has cleared the Compulsory Purchase Order and construction of the Poolbeg seems set to continue (according to the Irish Times).

UPDATE: JD DUG UP THE PERTINENT LEGISLATION

While a lot of effort was spent (in vain, it appears) to stop incineration in one particular constituency, there is a warning about the quality of drinking water. We said roughly the same thing over a year ago and the EPA issued warnings before that. Although there is an investment deficit, it is not likely that drinking water quality can be improved without institutional reform. There is no sign of that.

Submission to waste consultation

We made a submission to the public consultations on waste policy. It refers back to our earlier work.

The proposed waste policy is roughly equal to the Eunomia report (available on the consultation site), ignoring all the critique raised. Our submission therefore just repeats points made earlier. We also emphasize the procedural lapses in policy formulation.

Here’s our conclusion:

Waste policy development in Ireland is essentially on hold. In the past three years there have been a number of consultations, but, by and large, no definitive decisions by government. The development of waste policy in Ireland appears to have imposed costs with no discernable benefits in terms of policy development. It is a
case study in how not to go about consultation. Instead of being driven by a desire to set and meet environmental goals in a cost-effective manner, the proposals are to a considerable extent based on a predetermined view that incineration, especially large incinerators, should be discouraged but with no coherent economic or environmental rationale as to why policy should have as its goal this technology-specific bias. It is not supported by the government’s own international review.

Submissions received by the DoEHLG in this area have neither been published nor responded to, even where there has been ample opportunity and time to do so. There is no sign that this paralysis will come to an end shortly. The Draft Waste Statement promises that there will be an RIA undertaken as part of “further significant consultation and engagement”. This is likely to defer any decisions until 2011 and beyond. The reputational damage to Ireland, which is likely to spread to sectors of the economy beyond waste, as well as the likely failure to reach landfill targets in 2013 and 2016, is something that should not be contemplated lightly. It is somewhat ironic that a Draft Waste Statement that talks about sustainability and moving away from landfill may well end producing a less sustainable policy and more extensive use of landfill than anticipated.

Waste policy

One of the themes in the discussion about the Poolbeg incinerator is that it is perfectly in line with the official waste policy of the Department of the Environment while being firmly opposed by the Minister of the Environment. The Minister has now submitted a new Statement of Waste Policy for consultation.

The Statement is rather short, 26 pages (with only 13 pages devoted to policy measures), and not very specific in most places and often ambiguous if not muddled. Presumably, this means that the new waste policy is still some years into the future, and may not be ready during the term of the 30th Dail Eireann.

The Statement is firmly based on the Eunomia report, and does not even acknowledge the existence of the Gorecki report.

The first four policy measures aim to strengthen the role of the state, the counties, and the private sector (at whose expense, one wonders); to decrease costs and increase quality (always a great plan); and to achieve cost-efficacy by imposing additional constraints (a mathematical nonsense).

There is a proposal for the separate collection of six, perhaps seven streams of household waste: clothes and perhaps glass would collected at the kerbside (in lieu of the current bring banks); paper, aluminum, and plastic would be separated at sources (instead of mixed); and brown bins (for food waste) would be rolled out nationwide.

There is to be an arbitrary cap on residual waste (black bins), with financial penalties for counties that do not meet these targets (on average). County councils may respond by tacitly encouraging people to stuff their waste in green, brown, yellow, red, blue and purple bins instead. (There will be a tax credit cq supplemental benefit for the colourblind.)

The Statement reiterates the plan to raise landfill levies by 150% between now and 2012. As there is an EU-imposed cap on landfill, a system of tradeable permits would have been a better choice of instrument.

The Statement invokes the polluter pays principle and calls for an (unspecified) incineration levy that is unrelated to its emissions. There will be another attempt to declare incineration ash to be hazardous waste (it is not). In a separate proposal, there will be an arbitrary cap on incineration.

There will be arbitrary targets for recycling, but no policies to ensure that these are met.

Producers will carry a greater share of the cost of waste management. Newspapers and magazines are mentioned as an example.

There will be an awareness campaign to convince people to waste less.

And plenty of jobs will be created, innovation stimulated, and we will all become terribly rich.

On the one hand, the proposal is an improvement as the Minister now follows the proper procedures of a parliamentary democracy, and some of the hare-brained ideas in the international review have been dropped. On the other hand, the Statement itself is weak. Little thought has gone into costs, incentives and practicalities. The Statement strictly follows the green dogma of the waste hierarchy, a lexicographic ordering of options for waste disposal.

There is also an opportunity missed. The current Irish waste policy is sound (at least on paper). The main exception is household waste collection, with duplication of services and private operators competing with public operators-cum-regulators. The International Review recommended that this be replaced with a system of auctioned concessions, one of the few recommendations that it shared with the Gorecki report. The Statement did not adopt this recommendation, offering only vague language.