Recycling revisited

For many people, the warm glow of self-satisfaction they get after delivering a bag of bottles to the local bottle bank is adequate reward for the trouble they have gone to. However, the feel-good glow generated by the belief that they have helped the environment and provided employment often obscures the fact that recycling is a costly and often unprofitable enterprise.

In Ireland, recycling has been identified by the Government as a key weapon in the battle to control the country's growing waste problem. The Minister for the Environment, Noel Dempsey, wants us to recycle 35 per cent of household and commercial waste by 2013, as part of a more ambitious target of diverting half of all household and commercial rubbish from landfill over the same period.

Less than eight per cent of household and commercial waste is recycled, with the remainder going to landfill. However, Ireland is on target to achieve the 25 per cent target for recycling packaging waste by June 2001. According to Repak, the non-profit firm established by industry to meet its waste packaging obligations, 22 per cent is already being recycled and that figure could reach 27 per cent by next year.

But behind the green image of a country busily gathering its bottles, cans, plastics and paper for recycling, are statistics which suggest that Ireland's waste is increasing faster than its recycling rate. Figures produced by the European glass federation, show that Ireland's rate of glass recycling has fallen from 42 per cent during the 1990s, to 37 per cent last year. Although Ireland is recycling more glass annually, even greater quantities of glass are being consumed and therefore being subsequently dumped.

Faced with wildly fluctuating prices for some recycled products, and difficulty in even finding anyone to take other recycled products, most Irish recycling firms would not be able to remain operating without subsidies. For most products, recycling is not economically viable. Irish recyclers of glass lose £7 on every tonne of processed glass they deliver to bottle manufacturers, according to Rehab Recycling Partnership general manager, Bob Rowat. The firm is Ireland's largest glass recycler, with more than 800 collection sites around Ireland.

However, there is a steady market for glass, with a constant demand from Irish glass manufacturers for glass for recycling, according to the firm's sales and marketing manager, Greta Hickey. "If people were pursued, they would recycle more," she says. The Department of the Environment's post-Christmas campaign to raise public awareness of bottle recycling resulted in the volume of glass donated at Rehab sites jumping by between 20 and 30 per cent.

Recyclers can lose as much as £150 for a tonne of cans, Rowat notes. Two years ago, with the price of aluminium running at between £800 and £900 a tonne, good profits could be earned. The price is currently £500 a tonne. But, where once an average beverage can contained 80 per cent aluminium, manufacturers have cut the content to 50 per cent, with the rest of the can being made of steel. There is no market for steel, so that for a tonne of such cans, recyclers get just £250. Rowat estimates that the cost of collecting a tonne of cans is up to £400, as a truck may have to visit a tin bank up to 15 times to collect a tonne.

But the sale of recycled paper and cardboard has proved to be one of the toughest for Irish recyclers. The demand depends on the volatile global market and the type of paper concerned.

The paper industry is a cyclical business, dependent on the global supply of "virgin" pulp products. When there is a shortage of new paper on the market the price rises and buyers turn to the inferior, but cheaper, recycled products. However, when the price of "virgin" paper falls, buyers switch back, resulting in a collapse in the price of recycled products. The price of recycled paper can swing from being worth $700 a tonne to being worth almost nothing. "Even when prices are good the cost of collecting paper outside the major cities in Ireland outweighs the price you get for it," one industry source explains.

The key markets for recycled products are major exporting countries which do not have their own wood pulp industries. Fuelled by the need to get packaging for their exports and with little waste paper or virgin paper of their own, they are in the market for the recycled product. China has been a market for recycled Irish paper in the past. The greatest demand is for old corrugated cases, which retain much of their strength after re-pulping. There is also a market for white paper, recycled to make stationery. At the opposite end of the spectrum is newspaper, which is low-grade material and is contaminated with print.

Irish paper recyclers are also disadvantaged by the small domestic market for their produce. Ireland has just one paper mill, run by Smurfits, which reprocesses more than 55,000 tonnes of paper annually. However, the country consumes six times that amount of paper each year, much of it in the form of packaging from imported goods.

One of the high-profile victims of such price fluctuations is Kerbside, the firm which has collected recyclable materials from homes in Dublin since 1991, and which will be wound down in the coming months (see panel below). Both Kerbside and Rehab are funded by Repak, local authorities and the Department of the Environment, but the funding of recycling operations continues to be a major issue, according to Rehab's Greta Hickey.

"The government seems to have set its face against any form of change in the fiscal regime that would encourage recycling," says environmental consultant, Jack O'Sullivan. If the government were serious about the recycling option, it would introduce a regime of green taxes which would penalise those creating waste and transfer this revenue to those involved in recycling, says O'Sullivan.

A Department of the Environment spokesman says such taxes are being considered and the Minister has produced a consultation document on the possibility of introducing a tax on plastic bags. Taxes on other products would have to be considered specifically, according to each product, he adds.

A more imaginative fiscal regime was also needed which would reward the public for recycling, says O'Sullivan. New waste collection systems will be introduced in larger urban areas in the next five years whereby people will have three wheelie bins for recyclable material, organic waste and material going to landfill. While they will be charged according to the weight of their refuse which goes to landfill, O'Sullivan believes they should also receive credits for the weight of their recyclable items. "You have to pay people to do the right thing, and then charge them if they do not do it," he says.

Hickey believes that if Ireland is serious about recycling, then the number of collection sites needs to be increased, in order to make it more convenient for people to recycle. In France there is one collection centre for every 800 people. In Ireland there is one centre for every 6,000 people and this figure increases to one centre for every 10,000 people in rural areas.

Ideally, Hickey feels Ireland should follow the example of Germany and Denmark and provide collection facilities at every street corner. She adds: "The Department of the Environment should ensure that every new apartment block and housing estate has space for recycling facilities - we need to bring these closer to the people."

Tomorrow: the role of incinerators