Where do the contents of Cork’s wheelie bins end up?
206,000 tonnes of waste were exported from the Port of Cork in 2020, and only 5.5% of this was plastics for recycling.
This article first appeared in the winter print edition of Tripe + Drisheen. It is a companion piece to our special report into waste facilities in Churchfield.
‘Tis the season to fill the wheelie bins.
Christmas, with its consumerist excesses, is the time of year when Irish people generate the most amount of waste.
Last year, Repak reported that Irish consumers were expected to generate 81,000 tonnes of waste over Christmas 2020, a 7% increase on 2019 explained by a surge in online shopping linked to Covid-19 restrictions.
Repak is of course an industry-backed recycling group made up of the largest packaging offenders; it’s in their direct interest to continue to shift the onus onto consumers, so their solution to the waste problem is to urge consumers to use their green bins and to religiously wash out their mixed recyclables.
In September, the government made an announcement that left some people scratching their heads and some rejoicing: it was now possible, they said, to put “soft” plastics and films into the green bin alongside other recycling.
There was no announcement that a new partner had been found that was able to use this notoriously tricky substance as a feedstock in recycling. Just that you could now put it in your green bin.
So is it even being recycled? According to the figures of what’s leaving Cork, only a very small proportion.
Dublin’s National Transfrontier Shipment Office is legally bound to record all waste, both “green list,” or recyclable waste, and “amber list,” which includes hazardous waste and waste for incineration. I asked them for a breakdown of what was leaving the Port of Cork.
96,002 tonnes of “green list” waste, intended for recycling, left Cork in 2020, while 110,639 tonnes of “amber list” waste, including 82,295 tonnes of mixed municipal waste and packaging waste, was exported.
Only 5.5% of exported waste was plastics for recycling
In 2020, of the 206,000 tonnes of waste shipped from the Port of Cork, just 5.5%, or 11,659 tonnes, was “green list” plastic films, regrinds, pellets and powders destined for recycling.
It’s important to remember that this is just waste leaving the country: EPA records on individual waste licences also show how much of our bulky waste from the building industry, for example, is transported within Ireland for landfill or reuse/recycling.
And waste leaving the Port of Cork can have travelled from all over Munster.
For several years, I’ve been watching shipments of waste leaving Horgan’s Quay on a regular basis.
Bales of waste, with a visible mix of films, plastics and other rubbish, are loaded onto ships on the quayside twice per month on a weekday morning. Sometimes, as pictured, split bales are refused and loaded back onto the lorries to be returned to...where?
When interviewing for the Churchfield Waste report which also appeared in our winter print edition, I finally discovered the source of this waste: Country Clean in Churchfield use Indaver Ireland as a waste broker to export mixed municipal waste from the Port of Cork.
Indaver exports this baled mixed waste to The Netherlands to incinerate it in their facility there. This arrangement dates back to at least 2014, when Country Clean first began filing Annual Environmental Reports to the EPA. Indaver take in excess of 50,000 tonnes of Country Clean’s mixed municipal waste each year, according to their waste summaries.
Of the overall tonnage that Country Clean processes each year, their EPA waste summaries reveal that around two thirds is incinerated or landfilled.
the bulk of their incinerated waste (over 50,000 tonnes) is brokered to Indaver and exported through the Port of Cork but a small proportion (around 7,000 tonnes) is sent to Dublin.
“sent for storage” includes metals, batteries, building rubble, timber, glass and many other waste streams that may be recyclable and may ultimately be recycled, but their final fate is unclear from the code used to record them.
“mixed dry recyclables” were listed as having been sent to Forge Hill recycling centre each year; Forge Hill is one of the companies that appears on the National Transfrontier Shipment Office’s lists as an exporter both of recyclables and of amber list waste.
Country Clean is of course just one waste company: another big waste exporter is Greenstar, or Starrus Eco Holdings, who have a processing facility in Sarsfield Court Industrial Estate in Glanmire, with an EPA licence to process 200,000 tonnes of waste per annum, although they normally only process around half of this. Greenstar is a national waste management company with facilities all over the country.
Starrus Eco Holdings exported 21,243 tonnes of mixed municipal waste from the Port of Cork in 2020. Their AERs reveal a long-standing export pattern to Sweden.
The EU has levied €75 per tonne against landfill since 2013 as a disincentive for burying waste. The idea is that this will push recycling rates upwards. But Ireland has almost no indigenous recycling industries of its own.
Where are recyclables going?
The NTSFO figures for export reveal that a lot of “green list” packaging is being exported: at 75,000 tonnes, paper and cardboard is the largest volume.
But almost 50,000 tonnes of this was shipped to Turkey. After China shut its doors to plastic waste in 2017, Turkey picked up the slack, but a report by Greenpeace in May of this year cast doubt over Turkey’s infrastructural ability to deal with this waste.
“In March 2021, Greenpeace investigations uncovered significant evidence of British plastic waste being dumped and burned at illegal rubbish tips all across Adana Province,” the report said.
Most of the recycling exported to Turkey from Cork is paper and cardboard, with a far smaller tonnage of plastic, but Turkey has an overall recycling rate of just 12%, which raises serious questions about how this exported waste ends up being processed.
Who is taking our waste?
“Green list” waste, for recycling, went from Cork to the UK, Belgium and The Netherlands but also far-flung destinations including Turkey, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and Pakistan. This includes:
Turkey: 49,320 tonnes of paper and 3,506 tonnes of plastic
India: 19,150 tonnes of paper and corrugated card, 224 tonnes of plastic waste, 1,594 tonnes of tyre material, 242 tonnes of scrap metal and 1,445.22 tonnes of unspecified waste.
Vietnam: 1,651.23 of paper, plastics and sludge
“Amber list” waste went from Cork to Sweden, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, and small quantities to Denmark.
Great article; very informative. Zero Waste Alliance Ireland (https://www.zwai.ie/) has been highlighting for years the illegal exports of waste, as well as the licensed exports. Both types of export are indicative of a failure of Government policy; there are almost no financial incentives for re-using, repairing and recycling -- with the result that exporting is the cheapest option.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/zero-waste-alliance-ireland/