If you are a less than diligent customer of a certain bin company, you probably receive regular emails with links to photographs of your rubbish being emptied into the back of a their truck.
Your various sins against recycling are pointed out to you in a polite but disapproving tone.
You might get mildly annoyed over these emails on the basis that when you signed up as a customer of this company many years ago, you did not have to separate your glass or wash your yoghurt pots. Yet your bill has just gone up again.
And if you were approaching the grumpy old man period of your time on Earth, you could even find yourself wondering whether these changes are really for the benefit of the planet or the bin company. Work that the bin company used to do is now being transferred on to your shoulders, yet your bin charges have not gone down.
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You might decide then and there to change bin company and ring up all its competitors – it won’t take long as there aren’t many – to find they charge pretty much the same price for the same service.
There is not much else you can do after that, other than to lie down for a while in a darkened room and listen to recordings of whale songs.
Whatever you do next, make sure you do not read a newspaper report that the Irish Waste Management Association (IWMA), which represents the bin companies, is opposing a proposal to reform the industry because it will damage competition. You will need something stronger than whale songs.
Ireland is unusual insofar as we do not directly regulate waste collection companies. There are plenty of laws bin companies must follow, but there is no single body charged with making sure they play fair and meet their obligations – as is the case with phone companies, energy companies and Uisce Éireann.
This surprisingly laissez-faire approach is attributed to the Government getting its fingers so badly burned in early 2000, when it tried to introduce charges for the bin collection services provided by local authorities. The political fallout rendered it a no-go area and led to the privatisation of collections.
We are also an outlier because we operate what is called a “side-by-side” system whereby bin companies are free to compete (or not compete) with each other to sign up customers anywhere they choose, although they tend to concentrate on certain areas.
Things may be about to change. The Department of the Environment has sought submissions from the public about changing to a system whereby companies will be required to compete for an exclusive fixed-term contract to collect bins in a particular region.
The period for making submissions has closed and consultants are due to report back in the spring. Don’t hold your breath.
The submissions have not been made public but according to a report in the Irish Independent, subsequently confirmed by a representative for the IWMA, the industry is against the proposal, arguing it would be bad for consumers because it will reduce competition. “It is inevitable that any change would result in increased costs on households already hit by cost-of-living increases,” the IWMA told the paper, presumably with a straight face.
It is not every day that you get businesses arguing against the chance to have a monopoly – albeit a regulated one. If anything, it should start the economic alarm bells ringing. But the bin collection business is not a typical business. Several big mergers in recent years have consolidated the industry to the point that the State competition watchdog has described it as broken.
[ Buy, eat, bin, repeat - we are locked in a never-ending flow of wasteOpens in new window ]
The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) has applied conditions to some of the mergers to lessen the impact on competition, but is firmly of the view that too much power is concentrated among too few players and that the industry needs to be regulated in the same way as other utilities.
A move to a franchise system would amount to the same thing and put enough of a fire break between the Government and the price of getting your bin collected to be politically plausible.
It might have been tempting to take the view that the bin companies’ lack of enthusiasm for change has something to do with the money they are making in the current unregulated free-for-all. It is reassuring to know they actually have the interests of their customers at heart. Second only to the interests of the planet, of course.
