Dubliners need to have a "rational, sane and sensible" debate about the capital's growing waste crisis without "getting tied up in vexed arguments" about incineration or service charges, according to the city manager, Mr John Fitzgerald.
In an interview with The Irish Times yesterday, he agreed that these two elements of the MCCK consultants' review of waste management in Dublin were bound to attract most of the attention because they were controversial. But Mr Fitzgerald insisted that thermal treatment of waste was now an accepted technology all over the world and, if it could be shown to operate safely and successfully, he believed it would probably not evoke any more adverse reaction than a new landfill site.
He said it was just as well that the consultants had not identified any location for the £100 million-plus plant, because the most important thing at this stage was to achieve general acceptance of the concept instead of having it "sabotaged" by a dispute over its location.
One of the principal reasons why MCCK had recommended that the plant should not come on stream until 2004 was to allow for a proper public consultation process to deal with people's fears. The year was also a watershed because the Kill, Co Kildare, dump would expire then.
The city manager pointed out that thermal treatment, whether by incineration or otherwise, would deal with only 25 per cent of Dublin's waste. The more important aspects of the MCCK report dealt with the need to reduce and recycle as much of this waste as possible.
"We need to have a rational, sane and sensible discussion of the totality of the problem, which relates to the growing volume of waste. If we sit on our hands and do nothing, it's going to double in 20 years, and that is clearly not an option," Mr Fitzgerald declared.
He also pointed out that the cost of waste management had doubled in recent years and was set to double again over the next five years or so. "The argument made in the report is that if it's going to cost £43 million, that £43 million should be recovered from those who produce it."
In his own discussions with senior officials of other European cities, he found that they were completely unfazed by the rising costs of waste management, because these costs were passed on to the consumer "just as if you were running a sweet shop".
Mr Fitzgerald said charging people for waste disposal "has to be viewed not so much as a fund-raising or financial measure, but one of cost recovery. And it's an environmentally sustainable argument that whoever generates that cost should pay for it.
"As an environmental instrument, if you were trying to design a system that was less likely to encourage people to reduce, minimise and recycle their waste, you probably couldn't come up with a better system than the one we have at the moment," he said.
The city manager emphasised that it was "not a question of bringing in rates through the back door". The scale of the waste crisis had to be brought home to people who, at present, were not aware of it since their rubbish was efficiently collected every week.
There were choices to be made about how much the different sectors - domestic, commercial and industrial - should pay, as well as whether to levy the same charge on residents of working-class areas with high unemployment as on "people living in Foxrock".
Fees for waste collection would have to be related to volume, possibly along the lines of the prepaid "tag-a-bag" system operating in most of the rural counties, he said.
