Your rubbish is your responsibilty… and it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg to get rid of it

There is a way to win, win, win with your bins

ENTAMAPHOBIA is a real thing and it’s increasingly common in Ireland. It’s defined as the fear of doors and, over the past six years or so, a certain cohort has been suffering acutely from it – to wit, the Fine Gael parliamentary party.

Latest reports suggest Fine Gaelers are worried about getting a roasting from their constituents over the bin charges row. Leo Varadkar has advised his people to prepare themselves because they’re going to be hearing about it on the doorsteps.

Unaccustomed though I am to comforting Blueshirts, I feel duty-bound in this case. Rest assured, Leo & Co, that nobody outside your urban constituencies gives a fiddler’s about the bin charges row.

You might get a roasting about other matters on the nation’s rural doorsteps but not about that.

Environment Minister Denis Naughten’s plan is that everyone should have to pay for their waste disposal based on the amount of waste they generate, instead of paying a flat fee and generating as much as they want.

In principle at least, it seems so eminently sensible a measure that it’s hard to see how anyone could disagree with it. And yet, last year, the Government had to shelve a similar plan because of public outcry. People found out they would pay more unless they reduced their waste and it was an absolute urban scandal.

Time will tell if Naughten’s nerve holds this time but who could have foreseen that a proposal that, in theory, should benefit everyone – if you produce less waste you pay less, and less goes to landfill – should have the Government over a barrel twice over?

In recent days there have been hysterical suggestions in political circles that bin charges could pose a bigger problem for Fine Gael than water charges, which seems a barking mad assessment. The two issues have this much in common: they’re both arguments about privatisation to some extent. One of the main concerns among opponents of water charges was that a national public water utility could eventually be sold off to a private concern.

Similarly, it seems that opponents of any change to the bin charge regime are still bemoaning the privatisation of waste collection in the capital. But that ship has sailed. It may have happened only five years ago in Dublin city centre but, for much of the rest of the country, municipal waste collection is a relic of auld decency. It’s not coming back, however much we wish it.

The big difference, though, between this issue and the water charges one is that safe drinking water is a vital public good, whereas bin collection really isn’t. It just isn’t. The evidence is this: water use is unavoidable, whereas for most people (and there are, of course, exceptions) it is perfectly possible to dispense with the services of refuse collectors, private or otherwise.

IN RURAL Ireland you are lucky if you can persuade anyone at all to stop at your gate and pick up your rubbish. Where there is waste collection, it will more than likely be handled by just one private operator, so competition doesn’t come into it. If you want the service, you pay what they ask; there’s no shopping around.

Here on the back roads of Clare, there was no domestic refuse collection at all until a private outfit entered the market in the 1990s. The local authority service operated only in the towns – and it opted out of even that service about 17 or 18 years ago, handing it over to commercial operators. There will be people voting in the next election who were not even born the last time the county council picked up anybody’s rubbish. It’s a vanished culture. The result is that there are two categories of dutiful citizen around here now when it comes to waste management.

The first comprises people who pay the private company to collect their waste once a fortnight. And, it should be noted, they’ve been paying by weight for years. It costs €309 per annum. If you have very little refuse, you might pay as little as €270; if you’re too damn lazy to segregate your waste, it might end up costing up to €400 and, if it does, it’s your own damn fault.

The second category – and the one to which I and many others belong – is the group who never trouble a waste disposal company from one end of the year to the other. Every so often, we pay a visit to the local ‘civic amenity site’ – you’re not allowed to call them dumps any more – and drop off our recycling and household waste in person. The price for disposing of a bag of domestic refuse is €7. Recycling costs €5 but you can fill your car for that money, so the tightwads among us wait until the rear suspension is nearly giving way under the weight of it.

By way of example, our household generates three or four bags of refuse a year – that’s €28 at most. The reason it’s so low is down to recycling and to other anti-waste measures such as curtailing the amount of future refuse you bring into the house. This means behaving like an out-and-out Bolshevik in supermarkets – taking things out of their packaging, for instance – but as long as you don’t mind being seen as a bit peculiar, it’s all to the good.

What people in Dublin don’t seem to realise, going on the evidence of the past few days, is that they can do the same. There are more than a dozen bring centres in the city, run on behalf of three of the four local authorities.

Dublin City Council alone has eight community bring centres that accept all the usual recyclable materials, including glass and plastic, paper and cardboard, aluminium and steel tins, as well as oil and batteries, green waste and even light bulbs.

You should have almost nothing left after recycling all this. For what you do have left, there are two ‘civic amenity sites’, at North Strand and Ringsend, where you can dispose of household waste for €4 per 80-litre bag.

CERTAINLY, it is that bit easier in the country. You’re likely to have a garden big enough for a compost bin and you can keep an indiscriminate dog or some hens to polish off leftovers. You’re also sure to have a car (since no one can manage without a car outside Dublin), so driving 25km to the dump is easy.

There are impediments for others – and town-dwellers face unique impediments. Living in an apartment is one; disability or infirmity is another, not having a car is another. Having one or more incontinent infants in the household is an impediment wherever you live, unless you’re one of those gung-ho organic terry nappy types. However, for most other people it is possible to avoid the uncertainty of fluctuating bin charges by bypassing them outright.

It may not be altogether civicminded of me to wish to curtail the profits of private enterprises but, as far as I’m concerned, my rubbish is my responsibility, not anybody else’s.

Save money, help the environment AND hit back against privatisation.

Win, win, win.