Privatising Bin Services ………. September 9, 2011
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Environmentalism.Tags: bin charges, Irish Politics
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Came home yesterday to find this lovely letter from Greyhound Waste waiting for me. Needless to say I’d forgotten that South Dublin County Council had abdicated its role in providing bin services and that Greyhound Waste had taken their place. All the while I’d told Panda and others that I wanted to stick with the Councils service as I actually believed a council should be providing such a service.
When the bin tags first came out I got myself a Green Cone and dramatically reduced the amount of rubbish that was ending up in my black bin, allied to that my youngest would soon be out of nappies, so my biggest source of rubbish was gone.
For hedge clippings, grass cuttings and plastics etc I’d go down to recycle centre in Rathmines once in a while with them. They started charging there for green waste , so I built myself a compost heap in the garden.
At this stage I don’t use my Brown bin and put my black bin out maybe 4 times a year.
So upon reading the letter I was delighted to see that I was going to be saving money on my bins.
except I wasn’t.
I read and then reread and found that no I had to pay this new annual sixty euro charge or my bins wouldn’t be collected.
Sixty this year ….. how much next year? how much the year after?
I don’t mind paying bin charges for each black bin I put out but I do mind having an annual charge whether I like it or not.
Whats the story with pensioners, unemployed etc? Will they have to pay the private company the sixty euro to have their bins collected?
We’ll soon have charges for water and whatever else they can invent and in time these utilities will be privatised. For whose benefit?
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
If you were receiving the unprivatised services of Dublin City Council you’d be paying a standing charge of €100 a year.
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Eh?
I buy a tag for €3 every time I want to put out a bin, which is about once every 3 weeks -so €51 per annum.
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Eh? I think you’re not living in Dublin City. No bag tags around here.
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FFS – I know where I live, and it’s clearly not in the universe occupied by your party. i live in Dublin 7, I buy a bin tag from a shop, stick it on my black sack and the nice men from the DCC – got that? DCC? – waste depot, just down the road in DUBLIN CITY pick it up on a Monday morning.
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Dublin City Council website: “Tags for bag collections can be purchased in most newsagents and post offices in areas where the bag collection exists.” Obviously you live in such an area and I do not, so I was unaware of this service.
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Typical fucking green arrogance to assume that you couldn’t possibly be wrong and therefore the only solution, however unlikely, was that I didn’t know where I lived.
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You may very well think that SoS, the rest of us couldn’t possibly comment.
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sorry. Trying day + easy target…
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You were just saying what we were all thinking so that wasn’t a complaint.
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Pity the Greens never got into power John or they would have shaken up the system…ooops…they were and abdicated all responsibilities. Private waste services will soon have a monopoly on bin collection and charges will steadily rise, as was clearly outlined by those groups fighting against these charges.
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Far from abdicating all responsibilities, the Greens almost got though the election of a mayor for Dublin who would have had control of waste policy.
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Almost…that should be the greens slogan.
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John, you are a nice guy so i will only type the following and not add any further comment…John Gormley-Minister for the ENVIRONMENT.
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Pardon my coarseness but you sound like you’re just whining and complaining here. What did you think would happen once waste collection became a commodity to be bought and sold like everything else?
Yes unemployed have to pay the same charges as everyone else. At first there were “waivers” but many of these across various districts have been eliminated.
It is for the benefit of capitalists.
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It should be remembered that Dublin City Council still provides waivers, some of the 100 Euro a year standing charge goes to financing that.
Does any of the Greyhound 60 euro a year charge go to subsidising waivers, does anybody know?
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Is all of the waste charges levied by Dublin City Council spent solely on waste management or does it subsidise other departments.Will Greyhound now be able to sell the waste back for the incinerater.How much of the Greyhound €60 charge will be subsidising some Fat cat or will this be generated by slashing workers conditions.
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In a real parliament, the situation that in South Dublin (and elsewhere) would cause some backbencher(s) to act.
The theory behind the charges is “the polluter pays”, but a system of fixed charges contravenes that. If we had backbenchers worthy of being in a national parliament, then one of them will use a bill coming in the next Dáil session to amend the law to prohibit domestic waste collection organisations from applying fixed ccharges and permit charges based only per “bin lift”. (And if no suitable bill is planned, then they should use the
Another thing an enterprising backbencher — or councillor, or investigative journalist — could do is get out the data on changes in illegal dumping of domestic waste, changes in the cost of cleaning up illegal dumping, and changes in the cost of cleaning street bins since charges were introduced. (I have wondered if the “business”, as South Dublin County Council described waste collection when they privatised the service, would be as profitable if the comapnies had to pay for the cleaning of domestic waste customers refuse to put into their bins.) It would also be totally appropriate for the Public Accounts Committee when they examine the officials from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government who prepared cost-benefot analyses of the legislation that permits councils to sell the waste collection service to scrutinise those briefings in detail.
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speaking of which
Authorities seek control of all Dublin area waste
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0910/1224303850533.html
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I dont think the bin charges cover anything more than (some) of the cost the waivers.
I think back in “Ye Olden Days” (roughly 1994) when the Polluter Pays principle was first promulgated by the dept. of the Environment, some of the local authoriities envisaged that they would gradually increase bin collection charges to pay for all waste -related activities (eg domestic waste charges would pay for cleaning parks and waste-ground, some of the commercial charges would be earmarked for city centre cleaning, etc).
The “cunning plan” aspect would be that when the poor domestic bin owner grumbled at the ever increasing waste charges, the County Council Spokespeople would be able to exclaim, with mock-horrified faces, “surely you cannot be against the “Polluter pays” principle?”
However, the rug got pulled out from under the local authorities with this idea when the government refused to let them charge the private waste companies for any of the ancillary costs of local authority waste management (on the basis that it would be an anti-competitive practice, as domestic waste collection slowly became a private business where local authorities only owned one of the business operating in that sector the locality).
I think the current “cunning plan” for the local authorities management is to get out of local waste collection entitely, and then try and get a revised licensing system in place that lets local authorities surcharge the private companies for the non-domestic waste management costs. The “cunning” bit of it is that it will be private companies collecting the “tax” for the local authorities.
Also, onc eall of the local authorities are out of the waste collection business, I think we will see the VAT rate for waste collection (currently 13.5 %, i think) increased as well.
And it will be the poor receptionist at Greyhound, Inc. that has to deal with the irate phonecalls from unhappy customer when they get their bills, like the example in the OP above.
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Sorry for all the typos guys…
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We go that too…..actually works out MORE expensive considering the number of times we put a bin out…gone from 10.50 to 12.40 per bin…..only solution to getting 6.20 per lift is to put out more waste!!!!!
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Well well well …. like the fool I am I paid the Annual Service charge of 60.
The company in question rang a few times this week asking me to pay it. I rang them back and asked them had they a record of my payment. They had.
So I asked how many bin collections I could expect for the 60?
Answer ‘None’
I quoted the letter “An annual Service Charge of 60 for 78 bin collections”
and was told that was “only for waivers”
So the fuckers got 60 euro out of me and I still have to pay more to get even one bin collected.
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Dublin city councils entire waste collection service was a fiasco and a total sham. All of these guys worked to a task and finish system and got paid a good weekly wage for working a 40 hour week yet none of them EVER worked 20 hrs any week. When the private operators began to undercut D.C.C. collection charges this work just faded away and now these wankers were working maybe 10 hrs a week and STILL getting paid for working 40. Plus they were paid a night shift allowance also. pmsl They were all in the pubs drinking by 10pm after starting work at 7pm ? Factor in the number of A/Holes who were on this gravy train and not just bin crews, but supervisors, inspectors, litter wardens and van drivers etc and one begins to see the SCALE of this ENTIRE DECEPTION. They should be all doing JAIL time for fraud. lol
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