Recycling Ireland

Ireland, the Emerald Isle, the land that has made green its own colour, yet there is nothing much green about the waste management infrastructure North or South of the border. Waste has not been a priority problem until recently. The local authorities, certainly in the North were at one time expecting a further delay in the implementation of the Landfill Ban on whole tyres. Their reasoning was that there quite simply were no suitable alternatives available. There were no tyre shredding facilities in Ireland.

However, the UK government has in its now traditional style not only adopted the latest legislation to arise as a result of an EU directive, but is intent on implementing the new law. That is creating a peculiar scenario in Northern Ireland where, as the deadline approaches, there is still no route to disposal, save shipping them to the UK, or perhaps to the Republic. The former is costly, and the latter may not be sustainable in the long term. With nowhere to take these tyres the gate fees are bound to increase in the run up to the ban, and as the cost of disposal rises, the attraction of players to the market will also increase. However, unlike the mainland UK, there is no widespread network of retreaders or collectors seeking to expand their business into shredding. That makes the Northern Ireland situation one of interest and we spoke to Lynn Kerr, the managing director of ADCO retreading and power behind R4 Tyre Recycling in Portadown to get the lowdown on the Northern Ireland situation.

The situation in the South is similar to that in the North in that there is no widespread tyre collection service. We are advised that what competition exists does so courtesy of a loose application of the law. As in the UK, waste carriers need to be licensed, but rather than a single license giving rights to operate nationally, the licences are issued on a county basis, so to collect in County Cork and shred in Louth, one needs to hold licenses for every county between. However, Ireland has a hidden competitor in tyre collection, something it has in common with France, the agriculture sector in the republic has some 140,000 individual farmers, of whom we are informed some 80,000 might be involved in making silage. With some 40,000 tyres each year allegedly going to silage that averages out at 500 tyres per farmer. Farmers can collect without license, apparently, and there is no monitoring of their collections as of yet. This is obviously something that needs to be controlled if tyre disposal is to be legitimised and any environmentally effective recycling is to take place. The Irish government cannot expect retailers to pay the licensed tyre trader 2 Euro per tyre when they can have their local farmer take them for 50 cents a time.

Far be it from T&A to accuse Ireland’s farmers of collusion in avoiding the law, but if those figures are correct, either the agricultural sector is dumping tyres in some hidden corner of a forgotten field, or the whole of Ireland is gradually going to be covered in tyres used for silage. Ultimately, the only thing green about the Emerald Isle would be on the mould and algae growing on their rotting surfaces.