The inglorious history of waste management in Ireland should make people wary when there is talk of moves to incineration. But salutary lessons are to be found even in the most environmentally-progressive economies of Europe.
They indicate some form of thermal treatment is necessary to properly process the more serious forms of waste that cannot be recycled, to counter the noxious by-products of industry and human activity.
The Environmental Protection Agency does not present incineration as the solution to Ireland's potentially acute hazardous waste management problems, although this issue will provoke most debate.
Nor does the agency advocate indiscriminate deployment of "thermal treatment" as a means to overcome the problem without addressing many of the other environmental consequences of hazardous waste generation.
In its proposed national hazardous waste management plan, drawn up with Tobin Environmental Services, there is a clear indication that thermal treatment has to be one part of the equation, if we are to be "self-sufficient" in terms of managing our own hazardous waste, much of which is now incinerated abroad.
It proposes that prevention, underpinned by funding of £35 million, be the backbone of Irish hazardous waste management. A target of keeping such waste to 1996 levels may, however, prove too ambitious. The pharmaceutical and chemical sector has doubled production in the past five years. It is responsible for a major portion of Ireland's hazardous waste output, although it has also been among the most committed to sound environmental management.
The EPA is realistic in accepting that even with cleaner technologies and increased recovery and reuse, hazardous waste in this sector is likely to increase.
The Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, has calmly articulated the risks of continuing a regime where so much hazardous waste is not fully accounted for, or shipped out of Ireland to any of seven countries.
With the EU increasingly demanding this waste be managed locally, member-states are increasingly likely to shut the door on it with little or no notice, as happened with healthcare waste banned by the UK since last year.
With growing economic maturity comes increasing environmental responsibilities, Mr Dempsey noted. In short, past mismanagement has to be replaced with the kind of environmental management routinely practised elsewhere, and extended fully across the breadth of industry, business and the home.
Unfortunately, it entails a very new philosophy for Ireland, heralded by the introduction of the I996 Waste Management Act, at a time when so many other EU countries have embraced progressive waste management for 30 years and more.