Poor Recycling Facilities in Cork - Why?

cork | environment | opinion/analysis Wednesday April 26, 2006 16:59 by Kathy Sinnott

To justify Indaver's incinerators?

I come from a long line of savers, women and men who believed that a rubber band or piece of string or jar lid should not be thrown away as it will come in handy some day. The fact that being a saver meant full drawers and stuffed shelves didn’t dissuade us, nor the fact that because of the clutter we couldn’t find the thing we saved when we finally needed it. Saving is ingrained. In our case, saving is almost genetic. Recycling was an easy concept for us. “Waste not. Want not” Recycling is just a more communal variation on saving with the advantage of no clutter.

Just like saving there is almost nothing that can’t be recycled. If there is something thrown away in our rubbish it is because someone has been lazy, which of course happens, or because there is nowhere in Cork to recycle that item yet. I was recycling in Douglas, a suburb of Cork, until January when the County Council waste recycling facility was opened in Rafeen. I knew where Rafeen was but learning the whereabouts of the facility was not easy. As I am geographically challenged and get lost easily I wanted to locate it before I loaded the boot of the car and set out. I tried the internet and phoning Cork County Council but ended up none the wiser.

Eventually I just set off and after a few tries found the new waste facility. It was well worth the effort, impressively neat and organized. Recycling on a Saturday afternoon in Rafeen is almost a social event. People chatting and visiting. Whole families busily going from glass to plastic to bottles and cardboard. Men and teenage boys examining the electrical appliance for spare parts

Despite facilities like Rafeen, Cork has not made recycling easy enough to become a key part to our daily response to waste. Having to load a car and drive to one of the centres puts recycling out of the scope of the majority of people who would otherwise be willing to recycle at their kerbside. In Brussels, householders buy colour-coded bags in their local shops. White garbage bags for rubbish cost several euros, blue, green and yellow recycle bags cost 5 cents. Both are left outside the front gate on their respective collection day.

Some Irish local authorities have developed kerbside collection and the people in those areas are building up a habit of recycling. We could do this if we wanted to. Do we want to or is the prospect of a major incinerator in Cork putting a damper on the development of widespread recycling?

Think about it. Toxic waste incinerators are hungry beasts. It takes a lot of non-toxic rubbish to keep the fires burning for the toxic stuff. So what would happen if Cork City and County Council got recycling levels up and produced less rubbish? A major incinerator would not be viable.

When Indaver first floated their proposals for a string of incinerators around the country they almost fooled the public into thinking that there was no other alternative to landfill. Recycling was something confined to glass bottles back then. But things have moved on. In opposing incinerators, we have educated ourselves and everyone around us on the alternatives of waste prevention and management. We’ve learned the three Rs. We now know a lot about reducing, recycling, recovering the resource we once thought of as rubbish. I suppose in fairness we should thank Indaver for that. If Indaver would accept our gratitude, take a bow and go away we could get on with the business of developing better wasteless, waste practices.