COMPANIES which fail to support a major recycling initiative by the Irish Business and Employers' Confederation, aimed at removing 120,000 tonnes of "packaging from the annual amount of waste, would face legal sanction, the Minister for the Environment has warned.
Though the scheme is voluntary, Mr Howlin said the quid pro quo for entrusting responsibility for recycling to industry was that it must deliver. Otherwise, there was a danger of the scheme being undermined by lack of participation by everyone involved.
"I will be prepared to deploy all appropriate powers of the new waste management legislation to deal with any problem of free riders," he declared. "We can't have good boys and bad boys in relation to this. Everyone will have to achieve the targets".
Mr Howlin was speaking at the joint launch yesterday by IBEC and his Department of the scheme, which commits industry to achieve a recycling rate of 25 per cent of all packaging within five years. A company called Repak is being set up to oversee its implementation.
The scheme, to be financed by industry levies, would result in a doubling of bottle banks and other "bring" facilities as well as the Kerbside Dublin "collect" service, currently serving some 25,000 households in the south west of the city.
The IBEC strategy was to come up with its own voluntary initiative to avoid mandatory recycling targets, which the Minister could impose under the Waste Management Bill. The Bill has already been passed by the Dail and is expected to go to the Seanad in two weeks.
But Ms Mary Kelly, IBEC's environmental executive, says it would be next year before Repak becomes operational. A chairman would be appointed "fairly soon" and, later, a chief executive and some staff. "We intend to get it up and running as soon as possible."
To finance the initiative, which she described as a "major leap for Irish industry", Repak would be collecting levies from packaging firms to bring in £2.3 million per annum for the first three years, rising to £4.5 million when the scheme is fully operational.
Ms Kelly conceded the recycling target would still leave three quarters of all packaging waste to be consigned to landfill dumps, but IBEC did not want to promise too much in case it could not deliver. Nonetheless, Repak was "a permanent commitment" to the environment.
"We want the rest of industry to know that this is a serious initiative, which they should look at positively and come on board with us," she said, adding that the scheme would not work unless consumers also became involved in the recycling effort.
Mr Noel Dempsey, Fianna Fail spokesman on the environment, described Repak as a start. However, he said 120,000 tonnes seemed to be a "fixed target" which will only be reached after five years. There were no targets for waste prevention and minimisation.
Greenpeace, while welcoming the Repak initiative, said the Government and IBEC were "putting the cart before the horse" by putting all the emphasis on recycling. "What is needed is a strategy to reduce packaging waste and to eliminate plastic packaging waste", it added.
The Rehab Recycling Partnership complained that the 25 per cent recycling target was a blanket figure which was unfair to materials like glass, where a higher rate of recycling had been achieved, while other sectors with much lower rates, like plastics, were "let off the hook".
Asked why IBEC had not placed more emphasis on waste reduction measures, Ms Kelly said the levy which packaging companies would be charged on a per material basis meant that they would have an incentive to reduce the waste they were generating.
Mr Howlin also conceded that the recycling target was conservative, but he had no doubt that when the infrastructure was in place it could be revised within the five year period. Even so, there was going to be a need" for landfill "no matter how good a recycling scheme is put in place"
Asked whether IBEC had a "twin track" approach focused of recycling and incineration known now as waste recovery of "valorisation" Ms Kelly said it was "going to be much more difficult to achieve the recovery targets imposed on us from Europe without incineration.
Mr Reg McCabe, of the Plastics Industry Association of IBEC, agreed that such a "twin track" approach was necessary. But another source suggested that the plastics industry favoured incineration "as a way of getting out of any recycling at all".
According to Mr Howlin, a number of waste recovery schemes have been submitted to the Department of Energy in response to its advertisement of tenders for biomass projects. But he stressed that any incinerator would have to be operated to "the highest environmental standards".
