WELCOME TO POLICY Matters, a series from The Journal that takes a deep dive into the ideas and solutions proposed by Ireland’s politicians on some of the biggest issues of the day.

As part of the series, The Journal sits down with different spokespeople from across Ireland’s political parties to take a deeper look at what they believe needs to be done across areas like housing, health, the environment and childcare.

Last time, we spoke to Green Party councillor Michael Pidgeon about how to improve public transport in Dubin City.

This week, we sat down with Labour Party Senator and spokesperson on employment affairs, Marie Sherlock to talk about the argument for bringing waste collection back under public control. 

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IN RECENT MONTHS, the Labour Party, Sinn Féin and others have been mounting a campaign to bring domestic waste collection back under public control. 

The remunicipalisation of domestic waste, if you will. 

They argue that doing so would help reduce costs for households and help clean up the streets.

Back in November of last year, a cross-party Oireachtas working group was set up to explore the matter and guide legislation through the Oireachtas. 

Since then, the Labour Party has introduced a motion in the Seanad calling for bin collection to be removed from private providers.

Sitting down with The Journal, Senator Marie Sherlock took us through what needs to happen to make this a reality. 

Sherlock argued that as it stands, private operations are making huge profits while local Councils are “left to clean up the mess”.

Household waste collection companies take in around €350m in revenue each year. 

Conversely, local authorities spend approximately €100m every year cleaning up illegal dumping. 

“So there’s a market failure there, right? Because you are not subsidizing one against the other,” Sherlock said. 

She argued that this is an issue because it then leads to underinvestment in waste management. 

The problems

Sherlock made the point that there is “no imagination” when it comes to waste management in Ireland and argued that things like underground waste chutes and shared collection points should at least be explored by Dublin City Council. 

Underground waste chutes are used successfully in other European cities like Rotterdam and the Hague. 

While in Barcelona and Copenhagen, public bins are piped underground, leading to less overflow onto streets. 

“So rather than everyone putting out their individual bags, we create facilities, like the bike bunkers, where waste can be collected in a central area – it’s protected, it’s not bags going out the night before or two days before or any of that kind of nonsense and madness,” Sherlock said.

She added that another issue in some areas, like Dublin’s inner city, are wheelie bins being left out to clutter footpaths the whole time because households don’t have space to store them. 

Over 900 streets in Dublin have exemptions where households use bags instead of wheelie bins because of this problem, but as a result, streets can be littered with rubbish from burst and ripped bags, attracting rodents. 

Separately, Sherlock made the point that although private bin collectors are supposed to provide brown bins (composting) to households, this simply isn’t possible in all areas.

In some areas there is also a total lack of competition, with certain bin providers having an effective monopoly, meaning they can basically charge whatever they like, Sherlock argued. 

Getting to a better system

“Over the last few years, we’ve been doing a piece of work and looking at how we could move away from competition in the market to competition for the market.

“Ultimately, I would like to get to a place where we’re talking about remunicipalisation. But I think anybody who’s seriously looking at these issues, recognises that there’s a whole host of challenges that we need to overcome – legal obstacles, to get to that space,” Sherlock said. 

Sherlock takes the view that the first step, for Dublin, is to have the four local authorities tendering for a single provider and effectively exerting much more control over how waste is collected. 

This would see one provider gain a contract to collect all bins in the local authority area, effectively removing the choice from the consumer and Sherlock argues, provides far greater oversight of the service plus greater certainty in relation to pricing. 

“Some people would say we want the choice, but when you ask people if they are happy with the current system, they might say well I’m happy with my current collection system but I’m annoyed about illegal dumping. So we need to be able to join those dots. 

“That’s the critical thing, we want investment in the system overall,” Sherlock said. 

“This is the problem and I’ve said this before, what we’re talking about here isn’t just bins and to reduce it to that is a mistake in some ways, because it’s about the whole system of waste management.”

Does this then mean higher prices for households, if the vision is to fund the whole system of waste management in a more holistic way? 

“I don’t envision that prices would go up,” Sherlock said. 

“At the moment, every company, unless they’ve got a loss leader strategy, every company has to build on a profit margin to what they’re charging you and I. So I don’t see the prices would go up at all.”

Look at the profits made by some of the waste companies and bear in mind, many of these are unlimited companies as well, so there is little or no transparency as to what they actually earn.

“I’m not sure the competition has worked,” Sherlock added.  

“There’s very little control overall being exerted by any one local authority because of the way the system is set up,” she said. 

Sherlock made the point that Government parties signalled support for the Labour motion in May, but that there is a big difference between that and actually doing something about it. 

There’s a degree of fatalism there, that it is always going to be like this.

“But actually it can be different and if you go to different European cities there is a different landscape there,” Sherlock said. 

Even in Dublin, we don’t have 100% coverage – not all houses in Dublin have a waste collecting service.

“Which is shocking,” Sherlock added. 

“How in this day and age have we allowed this system to develop? It is because it is a profit-driven system.”  

Threat of legal challenges

One significant stumbling block for those who want to see waste collection brought under public control is the potential for legal challenges by existing private providers. 

The Institute of Public Administration has warned that there could be major legal challenges from existing private refuse collection companies without laws being put in place to allow for the change. 

When asked about this, Sherlock prefixed her response with a big qualifer to say she is not a lawyer or barriser but said:  

“If Dublin City Council was to wake up tomorrow morning, and say we’re bringing it all in house, you would have massive legal difficulty on competition grounds. And there’s a whole raft of EU law.”

Sherlock added that this was previously tested in 2009, when the High Court ruled Dublin’s four local authorities had breached competition law in their bid to try and tender for bin collection. The case was taken by the parent company of Panda Waste Services. 

Since then, the EU has introduced the Concessions Directive, which deals with services of public necessity, and there is now a view that competition for the market would be allowable. 

“Ultimately, to those who say, we just want to bring it in-house immediately. I think what you need to do is see the four Dublin local authorities setting up their own waste management company, going toe-to-toe with the private operations. And over time, winning their own bid.

“And that would be brilliant. It would be fantastic. But I suppose I’m just dealing with the here and now and at least if we have one company bidding you can exert much greater control over that service then,” Sherlock said.

Would there be any legal constraints on the Dublin local authorities doing this? 

Sherlock doesn’t believe so, instead she puts the inertia down to a lack of political and financial will.

Sherlock argued that there is a “conservative mindset” within local authories with regard to what they can and cannot do and that this has stalled progress. 

“That culture has developed and evolved over many years, because of the erosion of local authority powers.

“The result now is that local authorities are quite risk averse.”

She added: “To be fair, Richard Shakespeare [the chief executive of Dublin City Council] has talked about the issues that are there.

“Now, they’re trialling a collapsable bin, which is great and look, we welcome all sorts of innovation. Richard would also make the point that the underground waste collection system, probably would run into a lot of difficulties in Dublin because of all the services underneath but again, let’s look at the feasibility.” 

All of this leads Sherlock to believe we are “awhile away” from seeing Dublin’s local authorities tendering for waste collection services.