The State is facing a waste crisis that is threatening to bury the country, according to the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen. He said yesterday every person in this State was now producing 700 kg of household and commercial waste a year.
"That is three times more than they do in the Netherlands. If this continues, the figure will rise to two tonnes per person by 2015," he said.
Landfills in six out of 10 regions in the country had less than three years capacity left, yet people were producing enough waste to cover every single town in Ireland. "We have to change. Doing nothing is not an option," Mr Cullen said.
Ireland is close to the bottom of the EU league when it comes to recycling. The State achieved a recycling rate of 13.3 per cent in 2001, compared with a rate of 45-50 per cent in Denmark and Sweden, Mr Cullen said.
"We want to get up to 40 to 50 per cent of our waste recycled in this country. This is an achievable target. We can do it by reducing and recycling."
The need for incinerators was clear, Mr Cullen said, but "as part of, and only part of, the whole ensemble of waste facilities".
The Minister for the Environment was speaking at the launch of his Department's new Race Against Waste awareness campaign. It includes a series of five TV advertisements, the first of which was broadcast last night. The imagery of waste falling from the sky onto children and rats falling onto car windscreens was considered too shocking to be broadcast before 9 p.m.
Mr Cullen said the advertisements were deliberately shocking "to bring the scale of the waste problem home to the viewer". Some 2.3 million tonnes of rubbish was sent to landfills in 2001, with the volume of household and commercial waste increasing by 31 per cent between 1998 and 2001. Mr Cullen said a new survey found that 89 per cent were in favour of the Government encouraging people to recycle more.
Last night, the Labour Party spokesman, Mr Eamon Gilmore, questioned the contribution of the Government in providing recycling facilities.
He said the public was "way ahead" of the Government in its attitude to recycling. "For recycling to work in Ireland, a recycling infrastructure needs to be put in place , and the Government has failed to do this."
A new Government website www.raceagainstwaste.com went live yesterday, giving tips for reducing and recycling waste.
- Advice to individuals includes:
- Donating clothes and furniture to charity shops instead of dumping them.
- Buying larger bottles and containers of product.
- Using lunchboxes instead of plastic wrapping.
- Composting organic waste such as teabags and fruit peelings.
Advice to companies includes:
- Photocopying and printing on both sides of the page.
- Re-using envelopes and jiffy bags.
Consumers' attitude to the environment
- 91 per cent of people believe the plastic-bag tax is a good idea.
- More than one-third of people admit to have thrown litter, while one in 10 have littered more than once in the past year.
- Three out of four people say they recycle glass.
- 25 per cent of people with gardens are composting - no improvement since 1999.
- 42 per cent are in favour of a tax on chewing gum.
- 4 per cent of people say they still use plastic shopping bags instead of reusable bags.
- 81 per cent say they buy environmentally-friendly cosmetics, while 52 per cent say they buy pump-action sprays instead of aerosols.
Source: Department of the Environment's "Attitudes and Actions 2003" survey
