EVENTS
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 YRE AWARDS 1999-2000
An incinerator has been proposed for the Waterford/Kilkenny area to deal with the area's increasing waste problem. The proposed site will be at Great Island or at Bellevue. At the moment the great issue is whether to say "yes" or "no" to incineration. As part of the Young Reporters for the Environment Project, I surveyed 30 people on their attitudes towards incineration and waste disposal. The results were 57% against, 20% for and 23% indifferent to incineration. It is clear that the majority of people are against incineration. I set out to find out what other options we, the people of Ireland, have. First I will briefly give the background of movements against incineration in the area that I have heard of. In late September or early October 1999 every household in the Waterford/Kilkenny area received a letter asking them to sign and post an enclosed letter to Kilkenny County Council to "stop" incineration in this area. Also in October, a meeting was held in the Tower Hotel, Waterford, on the topic of: "Incineration and Health." Paul Connett, an American speaker, spoke strongly against incineration. The meeting was well attended with many people standing. It lasted over three hours. Opposition to the incinerator can also be seen in Bellevue where there are many anti-incineration signs pinned up on lamp-posts. In my survey I found that 23% of the people I asked were against both incinerators and landfills. My question of people like these is: what do we do with non-recyclable waste if we don't send it to landfill or incinerator? Three of them had suggestions but these all rely on recycling - "Make packaging more recyclable" or "Re-use things if possible." My objection to these points is that at present there are not many available recycling facilities - there are only facilities for aluminium cans and glass. It is important to first have recycling facilities before we begin to make packaging recyclable. In certain areas of Dublin, for example, an experiment was carried out. Householders separated their waste into various categories for recycling. However, after some time, the project was discontinued due to the fact that there were no available facilities to recycle the waste. Most of the carefully separated waste ended up in landfills. I have visited Germany a number of times and have always been impressed by their recycling system. Most public bins are divided into sections for different types of waste - glass, cans, paper etc. Germans also have a special way of disposing of plastic (PET) and glass containers. When you buy a bottle of water, for example, a certain amount of the price is paid as a deposit. If you return the empty bottle to the shop you put it into a machine which reads the barcode to find out what type of container it is. You then receive a voucher in return, which entitles you to spend a certain amount of money in the shop according to the type and number of containers you recycle. The only reason we could not do this in Ireland, I feel, is because of a lack of recycling facilities. At present we continually have to find new landfill sites as we fill our landfills so quickly. And some of this waste could be recycled. If we continue to produce so much waste we will spoil the beautiful, green countryside that Ireland is so famous for and turn Ireland into one big "dump." Although incineration may not necessarily be a great option, it decreases the volume of waste and therefore landfills would not be filled as quickly. Although it does produce dioxins it is better to use a controlled incinerator to burn waste than hundreds of uncontrolled, unfiltered "garden" fires, which produce more dioxins than an incinerator. In conclusion, I believe that for the moment an incinerator is our best option. Maybe later if we build recycling facilities, we can decrease our waste by so much that we will not need an incinerator but this is not an option for the near future, I think.
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Incineration
- A better way of waste
disposal?