Sir, – Séamus Conaty’s letter (May 4th) on increased waste charges rightly highlights one aspect of the growing cost burden on households. However, there is also a broader and more fundamental problem in how waste collection is organised in Ireland.
Across the country, multiple private operators routinely service the same streets, each sending heavy diesel trucks along identical routes. This is not competition delivering efficiency but rather a pointless and wasteful duplication. Households are now being asked to pay for rising fuel costs generated by a system that unnecessarily multiplies those very same costs.
There is also an obvious and avoidable safety issue. Refuse trucks regularly reverse into culs-de-sac and housing estates where children are playing and residents are moving about on foot. Each additional operator means more vehicles, more reversing and more risk. The idea we should tolerate, and pay for, far more of these manoeuvres than necessary is difficult to defend.
Other European countries organise waste collection on a zoned basis, with a single operator serving a defined area following competitive tender. The result is fewer trucks, lower costs and reduced emissions. Here, by contrast, we persist with a model that manages to be more expensive, more polluting and less safe.
READ MORE
What makes this all the more difficult to justify is that a more rational system could be introduced with ease by ministerial decision. Moving to a zoned model would remove the need for overlapping routes and could deliver a dramatic and immediate reduction in unnecessary fuel use and associated CO2 emissions, alongside lower costs and improved safety.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion the current approach is not merely inefficient but farcical. A senior member of Government should explain why Ireland persists in relying on a system that increases costs, emissions, congestion and risk, and whether any serious consideration is being given to replacing it with a more coherent and efficient alternative, and when. – Yours, etc,
Paul O’Shea,
Planet Before Profit CLG,
Dublin 18.
