Council plans to push more city residents to switch from bags to bins for rubbish

Foxes and seagulls sometimes tear open bin bags around John Clarke’s Stoneybatter neighbourhood, he says.

He’s out walking his dog Twiggy, who’ll sometimes sniff out strewn-about chicken bones.

Still, though, Clarke says he’s sceptical of an effort by Dublin City Council to switch more people from bags to bins, so there’ll be fewer bags available for seagulls, foxes, and other creatures to tear open – and less rubbish on the streets.

“It’s a challenge because space is limited in houses around here,” Clarke says, standing on the footpath at the corner of Mount Temple and Olaf roads on this wet day, a fine mist falling.

“We do have a little sliver of space outside,” he says. “But I wouldn’t have an appetite to change.”

Change might be coming, though. Dublin City Council staff are now going through the roughly 900 streets in the city where residents are allowed to put their rubbish out in bags, with a plan to switch as many of those as possible to wheelie bins instead.

“Our sole objective here is to get as many people away from presenting waste in plastic bags as we can,” said Barry Woods, a senior engineer with the council, at a meeting on 31 January of the council’s climate action and environment committee.

From bag streets to bin streets

Back in 2016, the government brought in new legislation requiring people to put their waste out in bins – if they could.

Dublin City Council had a committee look at which streets should get exemptions from this new law, so residents there could still put their rubbish out in bags – and about 900 streets got exemptions.

The list of streets with exemptions – or “derogations” – is shared with all waste-collection companies through the National Waste Collection Permit Office, a council spokesperson said by email on 2 February.

“As part of permit regulations operators bags should not be collected from any non-designated street,” she said. It’s up to the council to enforce that, but “Use of bags in non-derogation streets is not seen as a significant issue”, she said.

Back in 2016, Greyhound, one of the city’s big waste-collection companies, put out a press release saying that 90 percent of houses in the city centre that got exemptions shouldn’t have.

At the time, a council spokesperson said they planned to have another look at the streets that got exemptions. But still today there are about 900 streets with exemptions, Woods said at the climate and environment committee in late January 2024.

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“As part of our remit to reduce litter in the streets and to improve the appearance of the city we’ve started an exercise to revisit all those streets,” Woods said.

When the list was made years ago for which streets should be allowed to still use bags, in a lot of cases those exemptions were given because the waste-collection companies didn’t have vehicles that could go down narrow streets.

“Now the waste collectors all have alternative vehicles, so they have smaller vehicles that can go into a lot of the streets,” Woods said.

So far, the council has had a look at 60 streets in Dublin 6 with exemptions, “and 15 of those streets we can remove the derogation, and redesignate those streets as wheelie bin streets”, Woods said.

“But we want to then drill into the streets further, and go house by house and if we feel there’s curtilage to the front of the house, the side of the house or the rear of the house, we’d be recommending then that the resident, that house then would have to use wheelie bins,” he said.

Green Party Councillor Carolyn Moore said she worried that if the council forced people who didn’t feel they had enough room on their property to store them, they’d just leave them out front on the footpath or in the street.

“I see it on my own street,” Moore said. “That becomes a real issue then for the other needs of other households on the street.”

Woods said the council was only going to recommend a shift from bags to bins for homes “if there’s room within the plot of the house that the house owner owns” – not on the footpath or street.

The council intends to not only re-evaluate residential areas, but also go into retail and commercial areas, Woods said.

Will councillors have a chance to weigh in on proposed changes, as they did back in 2016 and 2017? asked Fine Gael Councillor Ray McAdam.

Said Woods: “Certainly we’ll speak to all stakeholders and we’ll come back to the councillors on that before we make a decision.”

Resistance

Clarke, walking Twiggy in Stoneybatter Friday, said he remembered there’d been an attempt to move people to bins a few years back – and that it had been withdrawn in the face of resistance.

Standing at her door in Stoneybatter, Vera McCormack says she’s always used bags for her rubbish and doesn’t want to change.

If she were going to switch to bins, she’d have to keep them out the back of her one-storey home on Olaf Road, as there isn’t even a sliver of front garden – her front door opens right onto the footpath.

That’d mean taking up part of the “small little patch” she has behind her house to store the bins, rolling the bins through the house each time she needs to put them out and bring them in, and having to haul them up and down her high front doorstep, she says.

“I’m sticking with bags as long as I can,” McCormack says.

McCormack says seagulls and foxes are about in the neighbourhood, and can tear open bin bags left out for pickup. “But I put mine inside black bags inside the other bags and that seems to keep them away,” she says.

Across town in Ringsend, Mary Byrne says they’ve bag-tearing seagulls there too – and they’re fierce and hungry.

She keeps her rubbish in a bag in her house in Saint Patrick Villas, and on bin day watches out for the truck coming, she says.

When she sees the truck, she dashes out to put it out just at the last minute – so the gulls don’t have time to tear it open and spread it about the street, she says.

Byrne’s home has a little patch of front garden, maybe just barely big enough for bins, but it’s completely fenced off, with no gate to get bins in and out of.

“Bins would be better if I had a place to put them,” Byrne says.

Communal solutions?

The council is looking– via Dublin City Council Beta – at a more substantial intervention too, putting in communal spots in neighbourhoods where residents could leave their bin bags for pickup.

The current model is for waste to be stored between collections in private gardens and yards, a description of the Beta project says.

In Dublin city centre, “this means that we’re asking space-restricted households to use precious outdoor space, and that we’re also using the busiest footpaths in the city to store waste often for quite long periods”, it says.

At the recent climate and environment committee meeting, Green Party Councillor Donna Cooney asked why the council doesn’t put in communal bins with underground storage, like those used in Spain.

Basically, a normal-ish looking bin above ground leads to a giant tank underground. It could be accessed via a code, so only people who pay can put their waste in, Cooney said.

The Beta project exploring underground bins has looked at how such bins are used in both Spain and Portugal.

It proposed trying shared above-ground bins first in Dublin, to see if the communal-bins idea could work here – before trying to tackle the specific issues related to putting bins underground.

“There may be problematic issues such as existing utilities located below ground (pipes, optic fibres, power cables, etc), or there may be other issues such as flooding,” the Beta project proposal says.

“They also require specialist equipment which the current collection vehicles in Dublin, both private and public, aren’t equipped with,” it says.

At the meeting in late January, Woods, the engineer, told Cooney, the councillor, that finding space underground for big storage bins would be a challenge.

But the biggest issue is that there are multiple waste-collection companies in Dublin, Woods said.

“It’s an open market here – you have a number of waste collectors – and therefore there’s an ownership issue over who owns who takes charge of that underground facility,” he said.

There’s another issue with communal neighbourhood bins, too, said Clarke, while out walking his dog in Stoneybatter last week. “I don’t think anyone would want that beside their home.”