Mayo County Council choose wrong way on recycling
From tomorrow, 29th September, those wishing to use the recycling facilities at Mayo County Council’s Civic Amenity Sites will have to pay €2 per visit (for cars). This is in addition to the €5 per bag for domestic waste.
Mayo County Council obviously have funding problems, no doubt in part due to the current economic climate and concomitant downturn in revenues from taxation, levies etc.. However, attempting to bridge the gap by taxing consumers who wish to recycle is surely the wrong way to go. Clearly the Council sees these ‘recyclers’ as a soft target.
Supporters of the idea mention the ‘Polluter Pays Principle’ but this is irrelevant – recyclers are not polluters – and the Council may not be contravening any laws or directives, but this misses the point. Waste is a massive environmental problem at a local, regional, national and global level. There is no single solution, but one of the ways of dealing with the problem is recycling. Authorities at every level have a responsibility to encourage as much recycling as possible (the government spends a fortune on adverts promoting the idea of ‘reduce, re-use, recycle’). You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that charging for recycling – even a ‘nominal’ €2 – will discourage rather than encourage.
The likely effect of charging is that less people will use the civic amenity sites – I for one will ensure that I only go when my car is full to the brim with recyclables – and there will be an increase in burning, dumping, abuse of (still free) bottle banks and, quite possibly, placing of mixed refuse and recycling in other people’s bins. Less people visiting the amenity sites (or people visiting less frequently) will mean less than anticipated revenue for the Council, which will undoubtedly lead to a raising of the ‘nominal’ charge to €3 then €5, continuing in a vicious circle.
There is an additional contradiction in what the Council has to say about its latest great idea. On the one hand the Council is obliged to open additional Civic Amenity Sites and on the other they want us to use waste removal contractors for our recycling. Who will end up using (and paying for) all these Civic Amenity Sites?
Recyclable materials are a commodity, a raw material that manufacturers will pay for. The Council should be using the revenue from this to develop further sites. Free access to recycling will maximise this income stream, rather than pushing the profits into the pockets of the private waste collectors.
This move strikes me as another example of short term thinking on the part of the Council and it is the consumer and the environment that will suffer. So no change there then.
