Plans for Dublin City Council to take back control of waste collection from private operators have been dealt a blow with consultants commissioned by councillors warning against the move.
The Institute of Public Administration (IPA) has said any attempt by the council to re-enter the market by collecting bins itself would probably be overturned by the courts, and establishing an exclusive collector for the city would require primary legislation.
Councillors in 2019 voted to “remunicapilise” the bin collection system, which has been in the hands of private companies for more than a decade, in an attempt to tackle mounting dumping in the city.
The council established a working group to examine the feasibility of the collection of bins by council staff and commissioned a report from the IPA.
The IPA compared the waste market in Dublin with four other European cities: Copenhagen, Oslo, Salzburg and Stockholm. “Dublin is the only one of the five cities surveyed with a fully privatised system of waste collection,” it said.
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“In all other cities there is a strong element of public involvement, with waste either collected by the municipality directly by publicly owned companies, or with publicly owned companies managing the service but tendering among private operators for kerbside waste collection.”
Illegal dumping “is not perceived to be a problem in the comparator cities” the IPA said, whereas “3,400 tonnes of illegally dumped waste was collected in Dublin city in 2020″.
Up to the mid-1990s bin collection across the State was undertaken by councils and funded by local and central Government. However, following the Waste Management Act, 1996 councils were allowed charge householders for collection and private operators were also permitted into the market.
In urban areas, including Dublin, charges for waste collection were only introduced in the early 2000s and were waived for low-income households “and in other cases remained unpaid by some householders who resisted the charge on the basis that it should be paid for out of general taxation” the IPA said.
Private operators began collecting waste alongside local authorities, in many cases offering lower charges to attract customers, leaving councils with a reduced share of paying customers and high levels of debt.
The Dublin local authorities decided to amend the waste management plan so waste could only be collected by the councils or contractors appointed by them. In 2009 private companies Panda and Greenstar took a case against the city council with the courts finding the local authorities’ action represented a breach of their dominant position and was anticompetitive.
Following on from this decision, local authorities began exiting the market. The city council stopped waste collection in 2012. At the time it was operating at a loss in the region of €10 million.
The IPA said any attempt by the council to re-enter the market would require legislative change, and even then “it is very likely, if tested, that DCC’s re-entry into domestic waste collection and the exclusion of private operators would be deemed anticompetitive by the Courts”.
If the council instead decided to have a “concession arrangement”, where it tendered for one operator to provide the service, this would not appear to be anticompetitive, the IPA said. However it would also require primary legislation which could potentially apply to all local authorities. “There is no indication that other local authorities want to change their waste collection arrangements,” it said.
