Non Collection of Bins attempted in Dunlaoghaire Rathdown

dublin | bin tax / household tax / water tax | news report

Tuesday July 18, 2006 19:48

by Terence

Campaign out to ensure bins collected.

Last Tuesday 11th July, DLR council atemtpted non-collection of bins in a limited area in the Broadford housing estate in Ballinteer leaving behind the bins of those who haven't paid the Bin Tax yet.

Lisa Maher (SP) of The Campaign Against Service Charges for that area received a number of calls from residents and as a result a meeting was called for last Monday night (17th) in Taylors Pub at 8pm at which about 15 people showed up.

It was decided at the meeting to meet the bin truck today and ensure that collection proceeded okay. And this morning a number of people showed up from 6am onwards in support and followed the bin lorry with the campaign banner around the estate to ensure no bins were left behind.

It is likely that DLR council will send out a supervisor next Tuesday week and another meeting is called for next Monday 24th at 8pm in Taylors Pub (Ticknock) to decide on what to do and we would be looking for a turnout of support next Tuesday morning.

Residents should be aware that it is legal for you to throw your own rubbish bags into the bin lorry whenever it stops and residents in a number areas like Ringsend and Ballybrack are already doing this regularly.

DLR have introduced a complicated bin tax scheme where there is a flat fee charge of approximately 85 euro per year, followed by a charge per bin lift, followed by a charge for weight. They can easily modify any of these charges and so quite easily raise the total cost of the service.

People who formerly had waivers are now been charged the flat fee. It is believed that waste volumes are down 25%, so the council is 'losing' money and will more than likely raise the flat fee.

The council are trying to register some of the bins and claim the truck will not lift it if not registered. This is simply not true. It has also come to light that the weighing mechanism only works on one of the trucks and not all the time. One resident weighed his waste and it was 9 kg, but the council rounded this up to 12 kg. There are widespread reports of gross inaccuracies.

A fairly large number of people have opted out of the service althogether. This can be done by writing a letter to the council and asking them to take away your bin. However you are then legally obliged to give receipts of all your visits to the dump to prove that you are disposing of your waste properly.

A number of bin workers have been laid off and a number of redundancies are pending. It seems that DLR council are getting rid of the older workers particularly those who would have memories of various strikes and struggles from earlier years and also would have secured better working conditions and things like pensions. This looks like a way by DLR council to break the memories and experience of solidarity of past struggles and save on wages and reduce the potential for strikes later.

There is still a large level of non-payment of up to 50%. This figure would include partial payers, whilst the council counts partial payers and those on waivers as paid. In Fingal bin tags are more expensive in areas where there are Green Bins. This indirectly tells us that they are charging for the recycling service and that eventually they will introduce charges for recycling. The efforts at creating a recycling infrastucture are merely tokenistic. It is well documented and plans are well advanced for a very large incinerator in Dublin in Ringsend. This will have a capacity for 800,000 tonnes of waste and since only burnables like, paper, cardboard, plastic and wood can go in it, these would suggest why the level of recycling, especially of plastic is so poor and once they introduce full charges for recycling, recycling levels will collapse and the incinerator will be presentated at that moment as the solution to the problem.

The net effort will be down turn in recycling and waste volumes will start to increase again and the waste industry will be able to make money off us during collection, then collect money from the government for running the incinerator, then again to dispose of the toxic ash and of course our health will suffer too. But it keeps the packaging, retail and waste industries happy. The angle for retail is that they get to sell you product that consist largely of packaging rather than the product itself. Consider a pre-packed tray of tomatoes will cost more to unit per tomatoe than if you bought them loosely. Since they come in packs of 4, and yet you may only need 2, then the other 2 go to waste. Same for the little packs of orange juice. Lots of single drink throwaway packs. Total volume of juice will be a lot less than the amount you would get in a large container for the same price. And so on.

The obvious thing of reduction of waste is not on the agenda. Glass bottles with a return-deposit system should be introduced and plastic bottles phased out, since only a tiny percentage are recycled anyhow. There should also be a levy like the plastic bag level introduced on excessive packaging. This alone would significantly reduce the amount of waste.

And lastly the council should simply give everyone Compost Bins, which can reduce waste volumes by up to 25%. These are available from the council at a discount, but can be found in virtually any hardware store and it is something everyone should start doing if they haven't done so already.

If we could all significantly reduce our waste levels further by recycling more intensively and composting, we could signficantly lower the value of the 'market' which the council and government is so eager to hand over to the private market. But since they control the recycling -but not the composting -hence they give it little publicity -then by virtue of that control they can sabotage our efforts by introducing green charges latter.

Lastly, people should never burn their rubbish especially plastic because it gives off toxic fumes.

Therefore this double taxation should be resisted.

Other recent Bin Tax articles can be found at:
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/77222
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/74471
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/74457

Ringsend Incinerator
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/76866
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/75480

Fast track law passed to allow incinerators to be built.
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/77050

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Comments (10 of 10)

Recycling

by Bemused

Wed Jul 19, 2006 11:00

The centre at Ballyogan is hardly " tokenistic". Neither is the doorstep green bin collection.
I've been listening for the last 6 years about how the bin collection is going to be privatised yet there are more employees directly involved in Waste Management now than there were in 2001 when the charge was introduced in the city. The rest of the article is the usual crap.

Terence has Head in Sand

by Salami Clone

Wed Jul 19, 2006 13:33

This is exactly what the Councils wanted from the start. Salami tactics. Go for non-collection on the slow. Pick one area. Defeat it. Then move to next area. The opportunity was in Autumn 2003. Fingal was attacked. Some activists were left wanting when this happened. Some wanted to limit solidarity action. Some wanted only areas affected by non-collection to oppose it. It's great to have meetings in DLR. But the ability for solidarity action was fundementally undermined after Autumn 2003.

Recycling tokenistic

Wed Jul 19, 2006 15:30

Reply to: Recycling

The centre at Ballyogan is tokenistic because it is the only decent one in the whole Sandyford, Dundrum, Ballinteer, Churchtown, Stepaside, Ballyboden area where you can recycle a number of additional materials like plastic wrap, heavy cardboard, engine oil, plastic bottles and other stuff. None of this is taken by the Green Bin service nor at the usual bottle & can bank locations.

There must be at least 20k or more people living in that area. To get there most people would need to drive. They are hardly going to take the bus. One has to consider that not everyone has a car (especially OAPs) and many people are busy working. Are we expected to spend our free time on Saturdays driving there? A real recycling infrastucture would have all those facilties easily accessible to everyone regardless of their circumstances. Indeed that is supposed to be what the Green Bin is for, except what you can put in it is very limited.

Over 18 years ago I stayed in a relatively small town in Germany and that small town had far better recycling facilities than anywhere in Ireland today! Back then, the Germans had bottle banks and the likes everywhere, but they also had paper banks on every 3rd or 4th street. Likewise all the supermarkets were operating return-deposit systems on every glass bottle and a further deposit if you returned the empty crate (of beer). So 18 years later we are still light years behind the Germans.

BTW, the Ballyogan centre should also have recycling for light bulks and florescent tubes. The white powder in the tube contains mecury oxide as far as I know making it extremely toxic. They should also collect old electronic equipment most of which contains toxic heavy metals used in the resistors, capacitor, diodes, PCB boards and other elements. There is no facility anywhere that I am aware of that recycles used batteries. There must be billions of these around. Again these are quite toxic.

Re: head in the sand....

Wed Jul 19, 2006 15:45

Nobody argues that the council did not use salami tactics. Regarding your point about waiting or not waiting for solidarity, much of that post bin tax campagin analysis has been discussed many times both here on Indymedia and by other activists groups and political parties. I also agree the high point of the various campaigns was a few years ago.

I don't think we should always view campaigns as won or lost. In this particular case, it is protracted and drawn out. Things can still happen. People can stop paying even if they had up to now. In the tag areas, people can try and recycle and compost as much as possible so as to reduce the market value of the waste collection service and so cause disruption and crisis for the operators. There is no reason why people in those areas can not launch campaigns to bring back the excessive packaging to the supermarkets on the very reasonable grounds that it is costing them money to dispose of it.

Ultimately what we want is a sustainable society that reduces the amount of waste as much as possible and recycles whatever remains. Doing this ourselves despite the bounds and limitations setup by the state can allow us to defeat them by that means.

What they want is to keep the volumes of waste up in the long run otherwise there really is no need for a waste service and if it is too small it will not be profitable. And this is why the incinerator issue is so important, because once it is there thats where all the recycleable paper, cardboard, plastic and wood will go and it is the means to take away our ability to shrink their profitable market.

Water charges next ?

by Mick Butler

Wed Jul 19, 2006 16:50

Good on you Terence, your points make a lot of sense. "River District Basin Boards" are I am told the basis under which an EU directive will be transposed into Irish law circa 2008-2009. This, I am again told will set in place the framework for implementing domestic water charges. The "Chamber of Ireland" last week called for all households in the country to be fitted with water meters to prepare for domestic charges.

The setting up of RDBBs is meant to be in place by the end of this year and requires widespread community consultation beforehand. The Govt, surprise, surprise, are keeping all this close to their chest, Dick Roche vehemently denies that water charges will be implemented, of course after next election twill be a different story. This information, if it is accurate and I strongly suspect it is should be getting rolled up the flagpole, I am sure a lot of punters will be concerned at more gross iniquitious taxes in the pipeline. No pun intended. MB.

Thu Jul 20, 2006 10:15

O.K. Terence, tell us where all these recycling facilities can be placed. The city lost the green waste centre in Raheny and has every proposed bottle bank and bring centre thwarted by NIMBY's.
There is no legal power to charge for domestic water but hey, let's not let that get in the way of the conspiracy theorists.
As for the notion that the proposed incinerator is going to receive all recycling material, God help us, I suppose council officials were on the grassy knoll in '63.

Water charges and recycling and the law

Thu Jul 20, 2006 12:11

At the height of the Bin Tax campagin in 2003 the City Manager said that when this was dealth with, they would be bringing in Water Charges next. As far as I remember this was reported on RTE and also appeared in some of the local free newspapers.

Re: Recycling -where can they be placed? How about in the Green Bins and how about adding plastic bottle recycling banks beside all the glass ones. I saw plastic bottle recycling facilties at most bottle banks in France the last time I was there. And the French are supposed to be pretty low in the recycling leagues. Besides one of the biggest plastic bottle recycling plants called Wellman International actually has a factory here in Ireland up near Cavan / Meath border. They have to import their plastic from Europe, yet somehow our government, councils and Green Bin crowd never seemed to have heard of them.

And as regards they have no legal power .... and the law in general, governments and States happily and regularly disregard the law and then change it in their favour, the so called Protection of the Environment Bill, 2003, being a case in point. Another is where under law the councils had a duty to collect your domestic waste, but not any more.

Your attempt to stick the label of conspiracy theorist on this discussion is amusing. Are you denying that there are plans for an incinerator or what? Or is it that you don't believe that they will put paper, cardboard, plastic and wood in it? If they don't put that stuff in then what will they put in? Building rubble perhaps? Organic waste which would contain alot of water and would therefore mean you would have to add fuel (like oil or gas) to the incinerator to burn it. Or maybe they are going to burn electrical goods or even glass. They will have a hard time doing that.

So I think it is pretty obvious then that they are going to burn the flammable material -in other words the stuff which we can recycle.

But just in case you doubt they are even planning the incinerator, even though there have been several motions about it in the Dublin City Council where the councillors rejected it numerous times, but they were over-ruled by the unelected and undemocratic city manager and all of this was widely reported in the press, here's some links to various reports on the incinerator, despite the fact that I have already included some in the main news report above.

SF slams €10m spending on PR for Ringsend incinerator
http://www.breakingnews.ie/2006/06/19/story263986.html

Contractor for proposed Ringsend incinerator
http://www.dublin.ie/forums/showthread.php?t=1310

McDowell must clarify his position on Ringsend incinerator says Gormley
http://www.greenparty.ie/en/news/latest_news/mcdowell_m...rmley

Govt will reclassify incinerators to pretend that waste doesn't exist
http://www.greenparty.ie/en/news/latest_news/govt_will_...exist

City Council block Poolbeg Incinerator
http://www.progressivedemocrats.ie/council_news/9/

New City Manager must respect democracy - Doolan
http://www.sinnfein.ie/news/detail/14599

Thu Jul 20, 2006 16:23

Sorry, I was away being sick at the thought of Daithi Doolan from Sinn Fein asking that the new City Manager respect democracy ( or anyone from SF/PIRA for that matter).
If domestic water charges are to be introduced it can only come about by an act of the Oireachtas. That's where the debate will be. Go out and get elected Terence and you can influence the decision. Or you can huff and puff from the sidelines which probably suits you best.
I'm looking forward to the thermal treatment plant in Ringsend, should be a nice addition to our city.

Re: Recycling

Thu Jul 20, 2006 19:43

Bemused, you have finally shown your true agenda. At the top you pretend to be concerned about recycling, then you seem to doubt the existence of the incinerator or at least recycleable material could be burnt it it. Your technique all along has been to belittle and sneer at the arguments, none of which you may any attempt to address directly or in any sort of coherent manner.

I have no intention of going out and getting elected, because from what I can see representative democracy doesn't work very well. The so called representatives are hamstrung at many turns, but in the case of the political parties, one of the most undemocratic instruments must be the Party Whip which is regularly used for bringing in legislation that neither the public or TDs want.

And in the alleged democratic city council, all the elected councillors were over-ruled by an unelected city manager. Additionally the so called Protection of the Environment Bill 2003, took all power with regard to waste policy away from the councillors. So I don't know what you are going on about by saying get elected and influence the decision.

share your thoughts

by share

Tue Mar 31, 2009 00:18

and your rubbish

cinderella

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Non Collection of Bins attempted in Dunlaoghaire Rathdown

Comments (10 of 10)