Way back in July 2016, bin charges were expected to arrive on our laps. Essentially the idea was, and still is, that the more you dump into the black bin, the more you will pay. According to a very helpful Q&A by the Irish Time’s Sorcha Pollak, it will become mandatory under law to accurately calculate these charges. The scheme would hand over all responsibility for waste collection and disposal to private companies. These companies are literally household names: Panda, Oxigen, City Bin Company etc. However, last July, the concern was that these companies, if given total control around price setting and calculation, would run away with themselves and increase the cost to consumers drastically. There was and is a valid concern here. Historically, the private sector driving up prices when handed a largely unregulated market is a very predictable occurrence. And so, the plan was put on hold so as to allow for an assessment of this new system to take place.
This freeze came to an end on Saturday 1st July 2017.
Like all good Irish citizens, when the concerning thing went away, we forgot entirely about it. Now, a year later, it’s back and it’s once again time to dust off that pitchfork, light those torches and scribble the word WATER off your placard so that we can tell the government to shove their BIN charges up their arse.
As can be predicted, the media are ramping up their coverage in line with opposing political parties. On Ivan Yates’ Sunday lunchtime show (Newstalk, July 2), Solidarity TD for Dublin South West, and professional agitator, Paul Murphy did not deny that a sizable amount of a post-Jobstown trial press conference to be held Wednesday 5th July will be dedicated to discussing the introduction of these bin charges. Indeed, we can all see it coming. The thoroughly unsexy Battle of the Bin Charges will be fought in the exact same manner as the water charges were. Social media will be utilised to galvanise large swathes of the urban population against this measure. Protests may gather momentum, from the hundreds to the thousands. Protest placards will become window dressing throughout Dublin as the public join forces with the far-left’s call for civil disobedience in refusing to pay the charges of the day. The reaction of Varadker’s government to this impending storm will determine how successful such a campaign will be.
Certainly, Enda Kenny’s cabinet fumbled the water charges issue from drawing board to execution. Rolled out at the tail end of Ireland’s age of austerity, the charges inadvertently adopted the political optics of another measure of said austerity; another tightening of the collective belt. When the ‘why?’ was asked, it was because the EU told us to. Before we could blink, water meters were being installed throughout the land and charges were set to be racked up. A more savvy political class would perhaps have foreshadowed the public’s disdain for such a narrative and framed the introduction of water charges for what it was: an imperative environmental issue. Regardless of one’s political persuasion, clean water is something that cannot be taken for granted and we were wasting it. Anecdotally, we all know people who leave the tap running while brushing their teeth, who run the cold tap before taking a glass of water so it’ll be colder?!
Yet the narrative was never about environmentalism. A few murmurs here and there. A few conscientious, but all too often quiet voices crackled over the radio waves but were drowned out by the charisma and attraction of the AAA’s and the People Before Profit’s narrative: that the government is shafting you once more with yet another austerity measure and you don’t have to pay it.
A word to the wise at this point: there are very few people, some might say none, that actually want to pay more charges, more tax. Nobody wakes up in the morning, looks in the bathroom mirror and wishes, in their heart of hearts, to pay more tax. However, there are some things that we just have to pony up for, and I think most of us can agree at this point that the environment and our preservation of it is one of them.
When the dust settled, the people had firmly shoved water charges up the government’s arse. Once more, the Irish people had been embroiled in a battle of narratives and the far left had won. Water charges were the scourge of a greedy government attempting to bleed the common man dry and we had stuck it to them. And so it went that just like the bin charges being frozen last July, we have forgotten about them. The EU, however, has not. There will be consequences for not meeting our conservation goals with regard to water just as there are current consequences for not meeting our waste disposal responsibilities.
In the aforementioned Irish Time article, Pollak notes that, “Earlier this year 160 containers en route from Ireland to China for recycling were stopped in Rotterdam because of contamination. The rejected waste was sent back to Ireland at a cost to Irish recycling industry of some €500,000.” These fines come at a cost to the businesses that currently dispose of our unwanted garbage, yet they come as a result of our inability to dispose of our waste accurately and conscientiously, even when presented with a range of disposal options at our front door. If we continue to refuse to correctly distinguish between landfill and recycling waste in our homes, the fines will continue to mount. At some point, the recycling industry will refuse to bear the burden of these fines and will pass them on to the waste disposal companies who will tolerate them even less and will seek to pass them on, at least in part, to those that are directly responsible for the waste contamination: we the consumers.
For that is what we are: consumers. We consume, we dispose. It is our right to consume therefore it is our responsibility to dispose of our waste as conscientiously as possible. This cannot be news to us either. From a young age we are taught about recycling. Personally, I am not old, but I am a far cry from young, and I have it drilled into me more than the ‘Our Father’: ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.’ Our housing is decked out with coloured bins, our fast food outlets with segregated disposal bins for our convenience. Yet we can be lazy. Everyone has been guilty of not washing out tin cans before throwing them in the green bin. We all know the quiet shame that should come from throwing black bin waste into the green bin and being too lethargic to go back and put it in the right container. Even as I write and re-read this, I am struck with the notion that these are atrocious first world problems, just like our misuse of clean water. These problems are Michael McIntyre jokes that have yet to make it to stage.
By and large, we are a people that would pride ourselves on our environment in one way or another. We love our landscape, our forests, our rivers and lakes. We dislike litter with a passion, and the majority of us understand and would argue that climate change is real and the environment is in dire need of protection. However, when it comes to paying for it we become irate, and perhaps that is because of the conflicting narratives we receive when it comes time to pay the piper. As with the water charges, the waste disposal issue is suffering from a disturbingly weak effort from the environmental front. It took far too long for people to realise the genuine bone of contention in the water charges issue: the possible future privatisation of Irish Water. This is where the real danger lay. One need only look to past instances around the world, like Bolivia in an extreme case, to see the damage having a natural resource given over to a private company can do to a country.
Before Solidarity et al. can ramp up a blanket civil disobedience campaign against a very real and pressing issue such as waste disposal, the public need to get on board with the harsh realities of the situation. We produce waste irresponsibly. There are fines for this and someone must pay them. The problem with the bin charges issue thus far is that there is no minimum charge per kilogram of waste. This leaves the public at the mercy of competing waste disposal companies. Pessimistically, this may lead to behaviour not unlike that of the motor insurance industry in Ireland. Last year, they were accused of price fixing in a cartel like manner by quietly agreeing that everyone would work off an industry agreed minimum which would rise uniformly across an allegedly competitive business. Thus, the consumer would never truly be able to find the cheapest option as it would be the same across the industry and would rise year on year as one major company announces a fresh rise due to varying statistics, with the others following in unity.
Therefore, as the people of Ireland, we really need to take a long hard look at the idea of Rights and Responsibilities. It is our responsibility to pay for the services that we require. Moreover, it is our responsibility to look after and protect the environment by conserving our water and waste, among other things. We must accept that as long as we continue to overflow landfills, we must pay for our waste and we must incentivise people to reduce their waste and recycle and compost as much as possible. That being said, it is our right to be provided such services at a fair price that is not at the mercy of potential price fixing.
It will not be productive to plant ourselves outside Leinster House demanding that the government scrap bin charges altogether so that we can go back to not engaging with the issue at all. The bin charges issue is one that certainly needs further fine tuning and is not as cut and dry as Varadkar’s cabinet would have you believe, but it is also not the civil rights catastrophe that Solidarity will have you believe. There are nuances to this issue that all sides are willing to discuss immediately, but we have to show them that we want them discussed now. Not after they sloganise the issue for our sitting room windows and risk losing focus on the larger, environmental picture.
If we truly are a people that believes in protecting and conserving our environment then let us not get caught in that awfully modernised trap of NIMBY-ism. Find your local recycling centre. Compost your food and use the brown bin if provided. Reuse your plastic bottles or buy a reusable bottle for water. It’s not that hard.
Just don’t tell the government to shove your waste up their arse.
-Jake O’Brien (03/02/2017)
jcobbryan 