A pilot scheme to combat Dublin’s street weeds without the use of herbicides has cost €200,000 in just seven weeks, equivalent to almost half Dublin City Council’s annual weedkilling budget.
The council in 2018 stopped spraying glyphosate, a commonly used weedkiller, due to the potential risk to the environment and human health highlighted by the World Health Organisation.
Recent studies from Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City University indicate bees may be at risk from exposure to glyphosate through contaminated wild-flower nectar.
“For many years most local authorities would have used glyphosate as a weedkiller, you would have seen lads going around on quad bikes spraying this stuff everywhere and it was extremely effective at killing the weeds, but we had to move to more environmentally-friendly solutions,” Derek Kelly, director of services with the council, said.
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Since 2018 the council has used a number of methods to try to control weeds including a biodegradable foam and acetic acid, essentially vinegar, but these have not proved as effective as glyphosate, Mr Kelly said.
Weeds flourished during the pandemic, but recently there has been a resurgence in growth.
“In various lockdowns there wasn’t the footfall and they weren’t getting trampled on by people and vehicles, but now that we’re back into full pre-Covid mode with a lot of people around the city we’re still seeing huge weed growth. It’s probably because we’re getting more warm and damp weather in equal measures and the methods we’re using just turns them brown, it doesn’t decompose them like the glyphosate.”
The council does not intend to return to glyphosate use, and has over the last couple of months deployed crews to manually remove the weeds.
“We decided during the summer the only real solution in the short term was to go back to basics. We got guys out with scutchers and shovels, road sweepers come up behind them, and we’re trying dig them out to get rid of those big weeds we can all see growing around the city,” he said. “It has been very effective, but it’s very labour-intensive and it’s very, very costly.”
The council’s annual budget for weeding using environmentally-friendly herbicides is €550,000, which covers about 300km of roads. Glyphosate cost about €300,000 for 1,000km of roads. The seven weekends of manual removal cost more than €200,000 and resulted in weed removal on just over 120 streets, including most of the city centre, as well as some suburban roads.
“Resource-wise it is too labour-intensive; we might have to look at going out to tender to try and get contractors to do this. But I think, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the money that we’re providing, €550,000, just isn’t sufficient in a year. You would need multiples of that.”
The current scheme will continue to the middle of November. “That will allow us to assess what’s needed, if maybe we need to order equipment to make it a simpler job than just guys with shovels taking it out of the roads,” he said.
“Clearly you can’t throw the kitchen sink at weeds and spend millions a year when there are other very important priorities. We have to be very careful we’re not throwing money away here, but there is a clear public expectation that we tackle this.”
