Within weeks the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will publish its National Hazardous Waste Strategy, designed to guide Ireland's future approach to waste management.
At the end of July, Indaver, a Belgian company, will seek planning permission from Cork County Council to build the Republic's first commercial toxic waste incinerator at Ringaskiddy, in Cork Harbour.
Both events are occurring at a time when people in cities and towns throughout Ireland are having to confront how the waste they create will be dealt with. Landfill sites, or dumps, are running out and unwanted by local communities, and exporting hazardous waste will soon be impossible as the EU makes it mandatory on each member-state to deal with its own problems.
It seems this will be difficult here, as we have little or no history of community action on waste reduction and recycling. In continental Europe attitudes to waste have become more sophisticated in almost every city in the past 20 years.
Reduction of waste volumes in the home, separation of waste before treatment, and composting of organic materials have become the norm. In Ireland the concept is almost unknown, and everything, from used refrigerators and paint cans to fluorescent light tubes and batteries, is dumped into landfill sites. Based on the most recent figures, this is how some 283,340 tonnes of all kinds of waste are handled in Cork city each year. Only at the dump site is any attempt made to separate the waste.
In Cork city and country areas only about nine per cent of household waste is recycled. Yet there is continuing opposition to siting a new dump at Bottlehill, in the north of the county, to replace the old one which is running out of space. Local politicians cannot agree on where a materials recovery facility, which would feed the dump with segregated waste, should be sited, and a campaign is gaining momentum to prevent the toxic waste incinerator proposal going ahead.
The anti-dump, anti-incinerator lobby would have a far more powerful case in areas like Cork if there was evidence of a mature, ecological approach to waste management. But there isn't, and instead the debate has leapfrogged over the issue and become stuck on opposition, both to conventional landfill or high-technology incineration.
The EPA's strategy document, as is clear from the draft report, will be in favour of incineration (or its more modern form, thermal treatment) as an option for waste treatment.
This may lead to a more considered debate than ever took place on burying everything underground and leaving nature to deal with it.
Indaver, which is proposing to build the Ringaskiddy incinerator, insists that incineration is not an end in itself but part of an overall scheme of waste management, which requires positive action by families in their homes as the initial step, and by local authorities after that.
The semi-autonomous government of Flanders in Belgium, where Indaver operates several plants, has adopted a unique approach.
It requires householders to segregate their waste into various streams for treatment before collection by the local authority. A typical "blue bag" collected by the sanitary services in Flanders contains Tetra packs used for milk, orange juice, etc., clear plastic containers, aluminium cans and food tins.
Organic waste is streamed in a different direction for composting and hazardous wastes, such as batteries, fluorescent tubes containing mercury, oil and paint, are collected and dealt with separately. The local authority is required to ensure that waste going for recycling does not contain more than 20 per cent of non-recyclable material. And if it fails, fines are imposed which in turn are passed on to the consumer.
THE city of Ghent (pop: 224,000) bears comparison to Cork. Nine per cent of waste in Cork is recycled; in Ghent, the figure is 54 per cent plus and rising. The nearby town of Destlebergen, with a population of 17,300, recycles 74 per cent of its waste.
Both are serviced by a public-private partnership, Ivago, which is responsible for education programmes in schools and homes; management of seven community recycling facilities; waste collection; and finally, incineration; energy recovery; and landfill of the treated ash.
Indaver owns 47.5 per cent of the private element in Ivago. Some 200,000 people visited the communal recycling facilities in 1995. Last year the figure was 500,000. The Ghent incineration plant handles 100,000 tonnes of waste annually.
In Cork, the company proposes to build two 100,000 tonne incinerators for hazardous and non-hazardous waste.
What was most striking during a recent visit to Belgium was the obvious participation of the townspeople in both areas in the waste management cycle. People were taking responsibility.
OVAM is the Flanders public waste agency which advises on policy. According to Mr Luc van Acker there, the Scientific Institute of Flanders has determined that the country of 10 million people now has enough incineration capacity to deal with hazardous/domestic waste.
An evaluation of future needs was under way, he added, to determine whether extra capacity would be needed to cope with the expected increase in industrial and sewage sludge over the next three years.
The institute had found that incineration was safe once gases from the burning process were "completely cleaned" - but incineration was seen in Flanders as only one element in waste management
Indaver runs three other incinerators in the Antwerp area and two in Beveren where a third is also due begin operating. Mr Ronnie Ansoms, its general manager for Belgium, says while plants may expand their operations, new incinerators are unlikely to be built because the Flanders government plan for waste management has now been met.
The Indaver plants, he adds, run to higher specifications than demanded by the EU and no danger is posed by potential dioxin deposits in the ash from the incinerator.
That's not quite how Mr Martin Besieux, the leading anti-incineration campaigner in Belgium, sees it. He says incineration should be opposed vehemently in Ireland because no matter what claims are made, it is unsafe and unproven. Cancer-causing dioxins and unidentified toxins which cannot be controlled are created in the incineration process and released to the atmosphere. They are also contained in the incinerator ash which is sent to landfill or used after treatment in road construction.
Whatever treatment is used, they will ultimately return to the environment. The mistakes of the past should not be compounded by accepting incineration when opposition to it would create the political will to find a better way of minimising waste and forcing the chemical companies as well as other sectors of industry to adopt cleaner procedures.
"In the short term, it looks better but in the long term, there will be a price. If you in Ireland want to keep out incineration, everybody will have to play a part and that means fathers, mothers, sons and daughters starting in the home," Mr Besieux said. In Flanders, he added, there was no longer either political or popular will for further incineration plants and over the years, there had been widespread demonstrations against them.
Incineration will not replace landfill but will become a new weapon, if it is accepted here, in the fight to contain and cope with increasing amounts of waste. It will be up to the regulatory authorities, such as the EPA, to prove to communities such as the people in Ringaskiddy now gearing up to oppose it that it is a safe and viable option.
In the meantime, it seems local authorities like those in Cork will have an uphill battle to persuade the public that the time has come to get serious about waste disposal.