Dubliners facing new charges for incinerator

All households in Dublin city and county face new rubbish disposal charges to pay for a £120 million incinerator and a new recycling scheme. Speaking during a visit to thermal treatment plants in Denmark, Mr Matt Twomey of Dublin Corporation said a flat charge would, most likely, apply initially but the technology would soon be available to "charge by weight".

Waste will have to be segregated by households and bins are likely to have computer chips to measure the amount of waste. Refuse trucks would also have computers. Only a fraction of the charge would go to cover thermal treatment costs, which would be significantly less than current landfill costs, he said.

Dublin's four local authorities which have sanctioned the plan may introduce incentives - giving credit for recycling, for example, said Mr Twomey, who is overseeing its implementation. Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council is in the process of introducing a £150 annual charge.

It is likely that an incinerator similar to two operating in Copenhagen and one in Vienna, which convert waste to energy, will be adopted for Dublin, because of their capacity and environmental efficiency. Poolbeg in Ringsend is the favoured location. "We will be meeting the local community shortly," Mr Twomey said.

Implementation of the plan is to be speeded up, Mr Twomey confirmed, with an independent environmental impact assessment (EIA) on incineration to be certified by the Environmental Protection Agency and an extension of kerbside collection of recyclable materials throughout the city and county.

Residents would have a strong involvement in the EIA process including access to comprehensive information and the corporation's advisers. A design which deals with smell, noise and visual intrusion would emerge after this. The plant is due to be built by public-private partnership and to be in place by 2004.

It was unlikely to supply heat to a large number of homes on the scale seen in many European cities but will feed into the national electricity grid.

The plant, which will take 25 per cent of Dublin's municipal waste (compared to an ambitious 59 per cent recycling target), would not rule out the possibility of using newer "enclosed systems" such as gasification and pyrolysis, according to Mr P.J. Rudden of engineering consultants M.C. O'Sullivan.