The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has signalled it intends to refuse to grant a licence to a subsidiary of CRH for the development of a landfill on the site of an illegal dump in west Wicklow.
In a statement last night, the EPA said it had issued a proposed decision to refuse to grant a waste licence to Roadstone Dublin Ltd for a landfill at Blessington, Co Wicklow.
The company sought permission for a landfill for non-hazardous waste and remediation of illegal waste deposits on the site. The material involved was a mixture of construction, commercial and municipal waste.
The EPA said last night that "the siting of the proposed landfill facility on the locally important unconfined aquifer in proximity to the Wicklow County Council Blessington wellfield would constitute an unacceptable risk of environmental pollution".
The EPA said the company had not demonstrated to its satisfaction the requirement to dispose of all of the waste as proposed in the licence application. Nor had it established that it was "not practicable to identify or establish a landfill disposal site in a lower-risk area and particularly at a suitably licensed facility elsewhere".
It also found that measures proposed by the company for excavation of waste on a part of the site were not sufficient to adequately ensure that odour, nuisance and groundwater contamination would not arise, thus causing environmental pollution.
The illegal dump on the Roadstone site, believed to contain 50,000 tonnes of material, was one of a number discovered in Co Wicklow over three years ago.
Roadstone Dublin Ltd said last night that the draft EPA decision was "highly frustrating".
