Urgent action to overcome "not-in-my-backyard" objections to waste disposal facilities was called for yesterday by the Construction Industry Federation. Chris Dooley reports.
Many areas including Dublin were in danger of running out of waste disposal capacity within five years, it warned.
It called for a political consensus on the way forward and appealed to politicians to "refrain from making a political football of the waste issue".
Mr Don O'Sullivan, the federation's director of main contracting, said regional waste programmes had envisaged investment of €825 million, of which €571 million was to have come from the private sector through public private partnerships.
However, this investment had failed to materialise and there was now an urgent need to provide a range of infrastructure including material recovery facilities, composters, digesters, incinerators and landfills.
The CIF was concerned that a shortage of waste infrastructure and the high cost of disposal were curbing economic growth. Landfill charges in the Republic, he said, were now almost three times the EU average for landfill or incineration.
Investment of at least €2.5 billion was required to provide all of the infrastructure envisaged in the regional waste plans, Mr O'Sullivan said.
"Virtually all waste infrastructure projects from the humble bottle bank to incinerators have been resolutely opposed by local communities and other anti-development lobbies." The protracted nature of our planning system and the cost incurred in the face of endless opposition is deterring would-be investors from a sector which is vital to the economic and environmental well-being of the State."
In its mid-term review and outlook published yesterday, the CIF called for the establishment of a national waste authority to co-ordinate and oversee the implementation of regional waste plans.
This body should have the power to intervene and directly arrange for the provision of infrastructure where regional or local authorities failed to do so, it said.
It also called for regional waste plans to be updated to reflect the new Environmental Protection Agency waste database, and to ensure that the plans amounted to a "viable and realistic" national strategy.
Two or three, rather than 10, incinerators were required, it said.