Waste plan scrapped after spend of €32.7m

PLANS FOR one of Europe’s largest landfills, a 210-hectare facility to be developed at a cost of almost €100 million at Nevitt, near Lusk in north Co Dublin, have been scrapped.

Fingal County Council, which had been leading the development on behalf of the four Dublin local authorities, has spent €32.7 million on the project over the past 14 years. With the withdrawal of a legal challenge to the project last month, the council had until yesterday to issue “notices to treat” to remaining landowners.

Some €25 million of the cost so far has been spent on land acquisition, mainly in deals concluded between 2004 and 2008. The council said the 60-hectare, €30 million Thornton Hall prison site set a benchmark for land costs.

For the project to proceed, the council would have had to commit a further €45 million in land and development costs by yesterday.

However, the spokeswoman said the regulatory and financial case for the plan had changed since it was first proposed in 1997.

The four local authorities had been obliged as waste managers to come up with a regional waste management policy under the Waste Management Act. However, the national waste policy allowed private operators to develop less expensive landfills outside the region, to which private collectors could take Dublin’s waste. This undermined the viability of the Nevitt landfill, which was also hit by the incinerator capacity at Carranstown, Co Meath, and potentially at Poolbeg in Co Dublin, the council said.

Other factors in the decision to abandon the plan included the withdrawal of the four local authorities from control of the waste business in the Dublin region.

Over the past 14 years the landfill had received approvals from An Bord Pleanála and the Environmental Protection Agency. A legal challenge to the EPA licence was withdrawn in the High Court last month. At that point the council had acquired 25 hectares of land within the proposed landfill site plus an additional 180 hectares of “swap lands” which were to have been available to farmers forced to move out of the area to make way for the landfill.

Land that will not now be acquired compulsorily within the proposed landfill site amounts to some 180 hectares.

Fingal county manager David O’Connor said the project had been developed “in good faith” over the 14 years, adding that he regretted the uncertainty families living on the site “have had to endure as this project suffered through inevitable delays due to matters outside of our control”.

The Nevitt Lusk Action Group welcomed the news, saying it had opposed the plans over several years and raised it at the European Parliament because it contradicted the EU waste treatment hierarchy.