Reports on Householders’ Waste to Replace Pay by Weight for Now!

On the last day of June 2016, the eve of the introduction of Pay By Weight,  Minister Coveney signed into law Statutory Instrument 346 which “removed the requirement on the collector of household waste to charge on a Pay by Weight per kilogramme basis” .

He replaced it with a system of soft touch regulation and discretionary enforcement!  Firstly it appears that it will be up to the waste service providers to  decide whether they wish to penalise householders who do not segregate their waste. If they do decide to do so, they must set this out in their Customer Charter to include the actions and penalties that they will impose. Secondly the waste collector, when requested to do so will provide to local authorities details of  a householder’s  collection service, including the waste types collected,  and when they  last collected. They must also provide names of householders who choose not to “partake in the collection of  separate classes of household waste”.

Thirdly the collector will report monthly  to each person who presents waste (which should  include management companies in the case of Multi Unit Developments), the weight of the various waste types collected and the registration of the truck which collected the waste. This may be seen as a stepping stone on the way to the future enactment of Pay by Weight, in that those who do not avail of a household waste collection system will be reported to the local authority. Meanwhile customers who do partake will be given monthly reports showing the amounts and types of waste they produce. Alternatively it can be seen as the abandonment of Pay-By-Weight as it  will be up to the waste collector to decide if non segregated waste will be collected, and only when requested, will information of a general rather than specific nature will be provided to the local authority.

This information does not necessitate, it would seem, identifying waste presenters who do not segregate their waste. It would appear therefore that regardless of the mandate set out by the European Union (Household Food Waste and Bio-Waste) Regulations 2015,  waste service providers and the local authorities in concert will be quite willing to collect and to have collected waste which is contaminated with bio-waste. As there will be no financial penalty for not segregating your waste (as there is no Pay by Weight), enforcement it would seem consists of sending reports to householders and management companies and hoping that they will do the right thing and segregate their waste at source.

This can be difficult when a large trench of householders, most MUD’s and most college campuses do not and have not been supplied with Brown Bins. Do we have another Irish solution to an Irish problem? We ignore the accepted principles of the polluter pays and environmental sustainability, while at the same time we expose the country once again to serious crippling EU fines ?