Irish Road Hauliers, Midland Tyre Services jointly oppose truck tyre disposal plans

The Irish Road Hauliers Association (IRHA) and Midland Tyres Services Ltd (MTS) have jointly announced their opposition to the proposed inclusion of truck tyres into the pending Environmental Disposal Levy (EDL) scheme. IRHA and MTS said their opposition has the “strong and universal support” of their members and customers.

The scheme currently intends to charge the EDL at the point of import and is planned for implementation from October 2017. The two organisations have so far acted separately, including petitioning Minister Denis Naughton of the DCCAE, to counteract the proposed scheme that stands to damage needlessly the Irish hauliers and the Irish truck tyre sector as a whole.

But with the process at a critical decision stages, the two organisations moved to recognise what they say is the “huge degree of alignment between their arguments”.

According to their joint statement these contentions are that:

1. “Repak, the organisation charged with handling the consultation, badly mismanaged the process by masking the radical differences between truck and passenger car tyres by combining the two discussions and dragging the truck tyres along until now.
2. “Repak, as the administrator of the eventual scheme, are conflicted, including financially, by having to recover their sunk costs from sizeable future scheme cashflows.
3. “Repak have been awarded the consultation and multimillion Euro scheme administration contract without the required EU Legal Tender process.
4. “As the largest independent truck tyre distributor in Ireland, MTS were consulted by Repak early in the process and gave constructive objections and detailed description of MTS’s disposal solution in place – a solution established for decades, self-financing, fully documented and resulting in zero waste. MTS were excluded from further consultation, despite promises to address concerns, and MTS’s solution was never put to the Minister and decision makers at the DCCAE.
5. “MTS disposal solution already covers over 50% of the Irish truck tyre disposal market and can easily be deployed for 100% with full transparency, no waste, no damage to the sector and no cost to the Irish taxpayer.
6. “The Irish Farmers Association have already established a precedent for agricultural tyres being successfully excluded from the levy, based on end-of-life agricultural tyres having monetary value. This same argument applies to truck tyres making truck and agricultural tyres radically different from passenger tyres, which have no value, resulting in waste/environmental issues.
7. “The proposed scheme would be promoting a waste process for ALL tyres, which is out of line with the EU directive on truck tyres requiring as many as possible to be recycled/remoulded. The proposed Irish scheme has no ‘Sustainability content’ now or longer term and countries like Germany have opted for solutions much more in line with the one used by MTS vs. regulatory schemes.”

The process is currently with the DCCAE with Minister Naughton having been petitioned by both IRHA and MTS separately asking for an audience. When or if granted, MTS and IRHA intend to attend the audience jointly to represent the arguments as well as the overwhelming support from the Irish haulage and truck tyre sectors, which continues to grow rapidly.

Speaking of the proposed scheme, the president of the IRHA, Verona Murphy said: “This issue was first brought to the attention of the IRHA by ‘Repak’ in which they presented the intended scheme at our HQ, the management team of the IRHA raised many questions to which Repak’s representatives could not answer, but assured us that they would provide answers to the concerns raised and those concerns would be addressed through constructive consultation going forward. Repak never contacted the IRHA again, and the concerns have been ignored. It is with grave concern to the members of the IRHA that the Minister would continue with any scheme with so many questions unaddressed, the scheme as currently proposed does not stack up and the IRHA and its members will not support the scheme nor will they accept monetary increases to the current arrangement.”

Mark Kane, the managing director of MTS also commented: “The consultation process has been so deeply mismanaged as to give the Government a completely false picture of what is actually going on in the sector. It is utterly shocking that such a damaging and needless levy can be brought onto a vital sector of the Irish economy in this deeply flawed way. The Government are being set up for an own goal. Truck tyres affect haulage of essential goods and supplies, construction and recycling/rubbish collection among others. Basically, these sectors keep Ireland going – and with the universal support we are receiving from the industry and so much at stake in terms of business viability, jobs and livelihoods – we are determined to fight this all the way.”