ALL OF Dublin’s household waste is to be buried in landfill sites in Wicklow and Kildare until next January under Dublin City Council issued contracts estimated to be worth about €10 million.
In the region of 150,000 tonnes of waste will be taken from the capital to the Drehid landfill operated by Bord na Móna in Co Kildare and private waste company Greenstar’s Ballynagran landfill in Co Wicklow.
Dublin no longer has any available landfill space following the closure last December of the Arthurstown landfill. The dump, which took most of Dublin’s waste, was about 4km over the county border with Kildare, but was owned and operated by South Dublin County Council.
The local authorities had anticipated the end of the capital’s landfill capacity for more than a decade but had envisaged that the Poolbeg incinerator would be opened ahead of their closure. Work on the incinerator began in December 2009, but has been suspended since May 2010.
The contract with the US developers of the incinerator, Covanta, is under review until next November, but the council has said it is confident the project will be back up and running by the end of this year.
The Bord na Móna and Greenstar contracts are the second batch to be awarded since the closure of Arthurstown. Last November the council contracted Bord na Móna to dispose of up to 120,000 tonnes of waste at the Drehid landfill, while Oxigen was awarded a contract to take up to 25,000 tonnes at its Corranure landfill in Co Cavan.
However, last March Oxigen decided to close the Cavan site following signals from the Environmental Protection Agency it intended to refuse a licence for the landfill’s operation.
Oxigen has now lost the council contract, worth several million, with the portion of the council’s waste it collected now going to its rival Greenstar.
A spokeswoman for Greenstar yesterday said its acceptance of a council contract did not signal support for the council’s waste policies. The company has said the proposed 600,000 tonne capacity Poolbeg incinerator is oversized. It also took a High Court action against the council which stopped it from controlling the waste collection market in the city. The council is appealing the decision.
“It does remain to be seen if Poolbeg will go ahead as the project still needs to raise finance which is not a given in the current environment,” she said.
While the capital’s waste is still being processed in the greater Dublin area, waste from Dublin households could be landfilled as far away as Limerick, Galway and Monaghan. The council will be issuing contracts to take Dublin waste until the incinerator is built and landfill companies in all these counties have been approved by the council to bid on each set of contracts.
