Denmark's environmental record is probably the best in Europe. Yet for the past 25 years, Copenhagen has been burning most of its municipal waste - something of an anathema to many environmentalists. The city has two large publicly-owned incinerators, each with a capacity to burn more than 300,000 tonnes a year.
Contrary to the case made by Greenpeace and others, the availability of incineration has not acted as a disincentive to recycling. Indeed, the proportion of all categories of waste recycled in Copenhagen has increased since the late 1980s. The recycling of domestic refuse is up from 9 per cent to 20 per cent and commercial/industrial waste from 18 per cent to 34 per cent.
Even more impressive is Copenhagen's performance on construction and demolition waste. In 1988, only 16 per cent of it was recycled, with 84 per cent going to landfill. Now, 90 per cent is recycled and just 1 per cent landfilled, with the rest incinerated. A future landfill site beside the sea, just 5km from the city centre, is used as a base for extensive recycling operations - with sites rented out to private companies involved in processing builders' rubble, for example.
All building companies in Copenhagen are obliged to sort their waste. They also have an incentive to do so because the cost of consigning it to landfill is currently 710 Danish kroner (£71) per tonne, compared to just 65 Danish kroner for waste delivered to the recycling centre.
Even reinforced concrete is processed on the site, using a crusher to strip the cement from its embedded mesh of steel.
Along with tarmac taken up from roads, all of the recycled cement products are turned into a gravel substitute for use in road construction.
On the same site - concealed by dykes planted with 25,000 trees - garden waste, stacked in banks for mechanical rotovation, is turned into compost for sale to organic farmers.
Composting is also being encouraged on a pilot basis in the Vesterbro area of Copenhagen, where residents of apartment buildings receive free advice from ecologists on how to turn their organic waste into a nutrient-rich compost for use in communal gardens.
In the historic Nyboder area, a Royal Danish Navy estate of early 18th century terraced houses in the heart of the city, residents take their recycleables to a neighbourhood centre which also accepts old furniture and hazardous waste, such as cans of paint. All households in the city pay municipal rates as well as water and waste disposal charges. The cost of waste disposal is based on volume and works out at an average of 1,000 Danish kroner (£100) a year. Recycling, however, is free. It is subsidised by the incinerators, which earn revenue from waste disposal charges as well as from the heat they supply to Copenhagen's district heating system. This caters for 1.5 million people and is a substitute for individual heating systems.
The extensive use of district heating also helps the city to achieve its target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 30 per cent on 1988 levels by 2005. If every home was burning oil or coal - fossil fuels that produce COs2] - this would be impossible.
Every year, 12,000 used fridges have their ozone-depleting CFCs removed at another recycling plant, where they are stored in steel containers for disposal at the publicly-owned Kommunekemi hazardous waste plant in the middle of Denmark.
Copenhagen's current waste management policy was inaugurated in the late 1980s, which means that Dublin is about 10 years behind.
Unlike Dublin, dealing with municipal waste is seen as part of a wider planning system.
The most recent innovation is along the quayfront at Nyhavn, the city's picture-postcard old port, where a series of Dalek-like containers, not much larger than litter bins, literally whisk away non-recycleable rubbish from nearby pubs and restaurants.
The rubbish is vacuumed through an underground pipe to an attractive modern building in the port, to be collected later by refuse trucks. That's how Copenhagen avoids one of Dublin's most unsightly features - the pile-up of black plastic bags on the city's footpaths. Like everything else in the Danish capital, it works.