What happens to the waste you throw into your green bin? Sara Burkefinds out.
The dog-food tin you were too busy to wash out, the smelly milk carton you didn't rinse, the sticky wrappers that found their way into the paper bin with the newspapers. Ever wonder what happens to the stuff after you've dumped it in your green bin?
At a recycling facility in Clonshaugh, Dublin, immigrants sort through the unsavoury bits and pieces left behind by recycling machinery. Five days a week, the 90 workers, none of them Irish, work three eight-hour shifts, sorting out the contents of Dublin's 400,000 household green bins. The safety signs around the warehouse are in nine languages. Men and women, young and old, mostly from eastern Europe, stand with face masks, picking out any alien objects. They get the occasional dead dog or cat, but most people seem to do as they are told and just put what's meant to be in the green bin. When the waste has been sorted it is baled, ready to be sold. This is no longer rubbish; it's now a commodity.
When refuse trucks arrive at Clonshaugh they empty their contents onto the ground. The pile is surprisingly clean and colourful. Then the sorting begins. A series of mechanical and human sorters, conveyor belts and magnets ensures that, within an hour, 10 tonnes of newspaper, cardboard, aluminium and steel cans, Tetra Paks and plastics has been separated and sorted. Where does it all end up? "The packaging all goes to the Far East," says Darren Flood, a supervisor at the recycling centre. "Eighty per cent of paper fibres goes to China. The steel goes to the UK, the aluminium to the UK and the US, the plastics to the UK, the Tetra Paks to Norway. We just don't have the markets here for recycled goods."
For the increasing number of us for whom recycling has become part of the weekend routine, it's out of sight, out of mind. Some of the south Dublin residents queuing outside Ballyogan and Ringsend recycling centres on a Saturday morning appear unconcerned about where their waste ends up. "I have no idea where it all goes, but it had better go somewhere, with all the time we spend sorting our rubbish," says Sean Martin, who lives on Pearse Street.
For others it's partly a financial issue. Maria Jennings, from Sandyford, is delighted with the Ballyogan facility. "It's a weekly trip for us," she says, pointing at her daughter, who is playing a computer game in the back of an enormous dark-windowed SUV. "They take just about everything: used cooking oil, fluorescent tubes, alongside all the usual suspects - plastics, bottles, paper . . . Every few weeks my husband comes up with the garden waste. It means we have very little in our black bin, so it's cheaper."
Recycling has become a modern equivalent of confession: we may not like doing it, but we always feel cleansed after emptying the boot of empty booze bottles, old furniture and broken electrical goods. Some recycling opportunists, known as "pickeroonies", hang around at Ballyogan, looking for resaleable items. Apparently, children have been fished out of some clothes bins, having been sent in to see what they can find. The day I visit, attempts to reclaim a decent bedside locker are stopped. Under no circumstances are people allowed to take items away, the pickeroony is told.
At another centre, however, two young men are busy salvaging goods. "I come here every day," one says. "I have four tellies in my bedroom, and I flog the rest to friends and family. It's the way I spend my days." Don't the staff mind? "It depends who is on. Some of them think what I do is the real recycling - I can fix them. Others just run me out of here and call the police."
So what can be recycled? Liam O'Connor of Shamrock Terrace Recycling Centre, in north Dublin, talks me through each of the containers. Dry recyclables are glass, cans, paper, cardboard, cartons and plastics. Like most recycling centres, it doesn't charge for taking these. Nor does it charge for taking old electrical appliances, paints, hazardous waste, clothes, batteries, mobile phones, fridges, freezers, TVs, radios, washing machines and cookers. But it has to charge for some items, such as rubble and gas cylinders. "Most people accept that they have to pay something, and it's not much: it's cheaper than a skip, and we do deals for the OAPs," says O'Connor.
Fluorescent lights go to the Irish Lamp Recycling Company, in Co Kildare. Paints, aerosols and pesticides go to an incinerator in Belgium. Fridges, freezers and other electrical equipment go to TechRec, a company that strips out and sells on their components. Clothes go to Enable Ireland. Glass goes to Rehab in Co Fermanagh. Stamps go to the Irish Peatland Conservation Council.
It's all part of our growing awareness of the need to cut down on the amount of waste we send to landfill. "We took to recycling late, but we are getting better at it," says Bernie Walsh of Sunflower Recycling. Walsh, who has been in the business for more than 10 years, runs a recycling centre in north Dublin. Sunflower Recycling is a not-for-profit business that collects recyclables and, more recently, has got into reusing furniture. When Dublin City Council started collecting bulky materials from homes, Sunflower would go and pick up what could be reused - couches, tables, chairs, beds, lamps. "But then the 'pickeroonies' started coming out, and they were there before dawn, so now we leaflet houses and pick up what can be reused before the pickeroonies get it."
Pickeroonies usually come from the new communities in Ireland, she says. "They are better at reusing than the Irish. They furnish their entire homes with what's on the streets." Walsh doesn't mind who does the recycling, as long as it's being done.
WASTE NOT, WANT NOT
In 2005 Ireland exported 80 per cent of its recycled household waste - 1.16 million tonnes - because, with the closure of Irish steel, paper and glass companies, we can't reuse most recyclables. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 39 per cent of our recyclables go to the UK, 38 per cent to Spain and Portugal, 12 per cent to Asia and China, and most of the rest to Europe. We process some glass and plastic, but much of this is exported for further processing elsewhere. Recent research for Repak shows that we think we recycle about 40 per cent of our waste; in fact it is somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent. So we are recycling more but also creating more waste to begin with - in 2005 we generated three million tonnes, 65 per cent more than a decade earlier.