Mr. Conor Walsh:

I thank the Chair for the invitation. The Irish Waste Management Association is the representative body for waste management companies in Ireland. We have 63 member companies which employ close to 10,000 people. Our members collect and manage all types of solid waste, including household, commercial, industrial, construction, demolition, hazardous, metals, aggregates, biowaste, etc. We represent about 95% of municipal waste collection and treatment in Ireland.

Waste management in Ireland is highly advanced. This is the only country in the world where every bin is weighed and the weights reported to the customers and the authorities. It is highly regulated by the National Waste Collection Permit Office, the waste enforcement regional lead authorities and the EPA. We work closely with all three to ensure the highest standards of performance in that context. Our "pay as you throw" system encourages waste prevention and recycling, with the result our household waste generation per capita is among the lowest in the EU. Ireland has met all our EU targets to date, but we are at risk of missing the new recycling targets for municipal waste from 2025 onwards.

Most other EU countries are also at risk of missing the new targets.

Our reported municipal waste recycling rate of 41% is similar to that of the UK, France and Spain but lower than that of Italy, Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands. We have formed an IWMA task force and are working hard on this issue in an attempt the meet the new targets. We commissioned Eunomia to prepare a report, which is cited in our submission, that looks at Ireland’s recycling performance and compares details with those of the highest rated countries. The report shows that our residual waste levels, or non-recycled waste, are similar to those of some of the best performing countries in the EU. The main difference in the recycling rate is the collection and treatment of biodegradable garden and parks waste. Municipalities in Germany, for example, count huge volumes of composted biodegradable parks waste in their recycling rates. Ireland prevents that waste. If we recycled as much garden and parks waste as Germany, our recycling rate would be 10% higher.

Our task force has uncovered large quantities of construction and demolition waste in the municipal waste data and we are working with the EPA to rectify this error, which relates to reporting practices for skip waste. This adjustment will show that Ireland’s municipal waste recycling rate is currently at 48% to 49% and that our residual municipal waste per capitais among the lowest in the EU, roughly level with that of Germany. To close the gap to 55% recycling by next year, we need to work on better segregation by all citizens, and we believe this requires a sustained national education and awareness campaign, alongside further incentivisation. We need to make it easy for people to do the right thing and hard for them to do the wrong thing. We are working in support of the relevant authorities to enhance the waste collection permitting system to ensure the charging systems are fully incentivised to promote waste prevention and recycling.

In respect of prices and competitiveness, SLR Consulting prepared a report, which is cited in our submission, in 2018 that examined prices in Ireland and compared them with those of other EU countries and with historical costs and prices. The report shows that prices have fallen due to privatisation and that, in 2018, prices were approximately €100 per house lower than in 2005. This should be viewed in the context of other utilities where prices increased greatly during that period.

In response to the question of remunicipalisation, the IWMA commissioned KPMG to prepare a report, which is cited in our submission, on this issue. The report shows that the transition to such a system would require an upfront spend of between €1.3 billion and €2.7 billion and that costs would continue to be significantly higher, with the result that householders would have to pay between 48% and 85% more each year for their waste collection service. We are strongly opposed to such a move and we say it will not deliver lower prices or a better service.

We are also opposed to competitive tendering or franchise bidding for household waste collection. Currently, approximately 25 companies collect household waste in Ireland. Under competitive tendering, this could reduce to five or six large companies and the market would become a lot less competitive. Our members have built, developed and expanded their businesses over the past three to four decades and cannot be expected to hand over those businesses to the State to be tendered out.

With regard to the deposit return scheme, we lobbied for a digital scheme that would use QR codes and the existing kerbside recycling bins, with a small number of reverse vending machines at strategic locations. Such a scheme would be much easier for the public, would have lower carbon emissions and could be expanded to much more packaging. This would have a much greater impact on municipal waste recycling rates. We prepared several reports and submissions on this subject, all of which are cited in our submission.