Sir, - Congratulations on your highlighting of the MCCK Group's Dublin waste management report (The Irish Times, December 23rd) and Denmark's environmental achievements. Frank McDonald's pieces were informative and progressive. However, your editorial was less so.
You state that recycling can only offer a partial solution since food items account for "a remarkable 40 per cent of household waste". But the answer to organic waste was clearly pointed out in Frank McDonald's article when he highlighted the successes that Denmark has achieved in persuading residents to use domestic waste for composting.
Households are producing too much waste, but incineration will not solve this problem - the solution is to create less waste in the first place. The hierarchy of best practice is clear: the first option is to reduce the amount of waste produced (e.g. use less packaging); the second option is to reuse the waste produced (e.g. return of used bottles to suppliers); and the third option is to recycle. Only when these three options are not possible does the landfill vs incineration debate become relevant.
Your editorial does not mention the onus on us all to minimise the amount of waste we are producing.
The real success story in Denmark (and other EU countries) is not that they incinerate their waste successfully (although they do). It is that they have made remarkable progress in reducing the waste they are producing; and they have increased their recycling rate to such high levels. The figures of 20 per cent of household waste, 34 per cent of commercial/industrial waste and 90 per cent of construction waste being recycled are what we must aim for. That is the lesson we must learn.
Our current rates of waste production are (to use the buzz word) unsustainable. Denmark has shown us what can be done. We must do it. - Yours, etc.,
From Tadhg Coakley
Information Officer, Clean Technology Centre, Cork Institute of Technology, Cork.