Dublin should set up swap centres all over the city, councillors say

Dublin should take inspiration from Copenhagen and look at setting up swap centres all over the city where people can leave things they don’t need anymore – clothes, furniture, books, whatever – and their neighbours can pick them up and take them home if they want, a council committee agreed last week.

The idea is meant to get Dubliners to re-use more things, rather than recycling them or binning them. This would reduce waste, of course, but also reduce carbon emissions and their impact on accelerating climate change – because it’d mean companies wouldn’t need to use energy and resources to produce quite as much new stuff.

Already, all over the city, there are local community-organised freecycle or “swapsies” groups on Facebook or WhatsApp to help people re-use baby clothes, coat hangers, dishes, books, chairs, lamps, and all sorts of other things.

However, in Copenhagen, the city government runs a more formal system for this, with physical swap centres people can visit to browse, rather than neighbours picking up items from each others’ houses.

In the Danish capital there are a dozen local recycling centres, where people can drop their cans and boxes, and also items that could be re-used by their neighbours.

The re-usable items are displayed in a swap centre, which looks like a little shop, and anyone who wants to can take them home for free, Anne-Lise Breuning, who works for the city, told members of Dublin City Council’s climate committee last week. The centres even have cargo bikes or wagons to borrow to take large items home, she said.

“In the past six years, we have tripled the amount of reuse, from 2,000 tons in 2018 to 6,000 tons in 2024,” Breuning said.

Green Party Councillor Claire Byrne, who chairs the climate committee, said she was “blown away” by Breuning’s presentation on what Copenhagen is doing. And she later backed a Green Party motion presented by her party colleague Janet Horner to look seriously at how Dublin City Council could do something like it.

It’s an issue independent Councillor Vincent Jackson raised earlier this year as well, asking the council’s chief executive to “look into the possibility of developing bring centres that would allow persons using the facilities for personal use remove and reuse, timber, cycles, furniture etc. could be easily re-used by others”.

But there are obstacles. For starters, it’s illegal for Dubliners to take things home from bring centres. Also, the Copenhagen model of funding these local recycling centres wouldn’t work because of Ireland’s privatised system for bin collection.

And then there’s the issue of finding space to put centres all over the city so they’re close enough to walk or cycle to. Copenhagen’s working towards making sure there’s one within 500 metres of each resident of the city.

In Copenhagen

In Copenhagen, each household pays about €200 a year in what Breuning and her colleague Tina Berg Jensen, in their presentation, called a “garbage tax”.

This covers bin “collection, containers, my salary, we’re using it for the whole operation”, Breuning said.

The city has a team responsible for building and running recycling centres, says Breuning, who is part of that team.

The city then hires a “public utility company” to collect the garbage and run the recycling centres and all of that. Berg Jensen works for that company, she says.

In the Danish capital there are five large recycling centres, plus 12 local ones, Breuning said. Her presentation focused on the small local ones.

Copenhagen residents can bring their recycling there, as Dublin residents do at bring centres. But in Copenhagen, these centres also have a range of other services, aside from bins to put glass, cardboard, plastic and other recyclable materials into.

They are also made to be more welcoming than the old-style Copenhagen recycling centres were, Breuning said.

“In the old way of thinking about recycling centres there were high fences, there were grumpy employees, who might have been pretty bossy about any mistakes you made sorting your waste,” Breuning said.

“In these new recycling centres, we’re trying to find profiles for employees that are more focused on spreading the joy of community, the joy of reuse, the joy of upcycling,” she said.

In addition to the recycling side of things, each local centre has a section set aside for re-use. They might have tools residents can borrow to repair things. And they’ll have a swap centre, where people can leave things in good shape, or take them home.

“We have a full-time employee that helps people put things in place, and then we have a bunch of volunteers that also help keep things looking nice,” Breuning says.

Space for these centres is hard to find in Copenhagen, so the city has done things like rent a space in a shopping mall, or put them in public housing blocks, Breuning said.

Said Berg Jensen, “The biggest resistance we meet when we’re building these small recycling centres is the space, because everyone in Copenhagen wants the space.”

“So whenever we can build a recycling station and incorporate a playground or something else that’s a really great way for us to find space, because nobody wants to give us space just to set up a recycling station,” she said.

One centre, for example, has a roof deck open to the public where people can hang out even when the centre is closed, she said – like a little parklet.

Translating the idea to Dublin

After the presentation on what Copenhagen does, Horner, the Green Party councillor proposed her motion.

To commit to the council doing a “case study” of Copenhagen, “with a view to developing something either similar or inspired by it for Dublin”.

“I’m not saying that we’re going to copy and paste everything exactly,” Horner said. “Obviously everything will have to be localised according to our own resources and abilities.”

There are challenges though. While the government in Copenhagen collects a “garbage tax” of about €200 a year per household and sets a garbage strategy and hires an operator to implement it, the system in Dublin is privatised.

Here, households can choose among private companies to provide containers and collect rubbish and recycling and compost. A household in Dublin might pay €330 a year for that service.

That set-up means the council doesn’t have the power to peel off some of what households pay for bin collection and use it to help set up local recycling and swap centres like the ones in Copenhagen.

Dublin city councillors have been pushing for the council to take back control of bin collection in the city, but that would require national legislation. And the government has said this is not on its agenda.

No “scavenging”

Another challenge is that if someone drops something at a bring centre in Dublin – say, a nice bit of lumber – it’s illegal for their neighbour to pick it up and take it away. That’s the answer Jackson, the independent councillor, got back when he asked.

“Dublin City Council’s Civic Amenity Sites and Bring Centres operate under Certificates of Registration (CoRs) issued by the Environmental Protection Agency. CoRs currently prohibit any scavenging of materials from these sites,” the chief executive told him in a written response.

Asked about this, a spokesperson for the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications said that “While informal reuse activities are undertaken on a number of Civic Amenity Sites (CAS), such as the reuse of materials like books, toys and bicycles, licensing restrictions may prevent this type of activity for a broader range of material.”

There were legal challenges in Copenhagen too, Breuning said during her presentation. But they got the law changed, so they could set up their swap centres, she said.

“Previously once something hit the bottom of the container then it was illegal to take it out again,” she said. “Now we can allow our citizens to take things out of our containers that they can reuse.”

Change may come to Dublin too, the chief executive told Jackson in his written response, as the government has promoting re-use on its agenda.

The Department of Environment spokesperson pointed to the “National Waste Management Plan for the Circular Economy, 2024 to 2030”, which includes a target to “Provide for reuse at 10 Civic Amenity Sites, minimum” during the period.

In the meantime, a lot of materials left at bring centres and civic amenity sites are re-used or recycled in various ways, the response said.

“High value clothing and textiles are typically re-sold for re-use on international markets, while damaged or lower value goods are repurposed as furniture stuffing and/or industrial cleaning rags,” it said. “Garden waste is recovered via an industrial composting procedure. Glass bottles are crushed and ultimately recycled as new bottles.”

Waste electrical and electronic equipment “items are typically stripped to their component parts and recovered for a variety of uses, depending on the materials extracted, as is furniture and other bulky waste items”, it said. “Any materials that cannot be prepared for reuse are typically recovered as Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF) for use in the cement making industry.”

But it’s not a neighbour-to-neighbour system of simply continuing to use items that are in good condition.

Lack of space

Another challenge in Dublin, as in Copenhagen, is the difficulty of finding space to put in local recycling and swap centres.

After the climate committee agreed the Green Party motion to look at doing something in Dublin like what Copenhagen’s doing, Dublin City Council executive manager Derek Kelly said the council’s already been thinking about this.

“My team in waste management are already engaging with the Rediscovery Centre”, the National Centre for the Circular Economy, in Ballymun, “and there’s been engagement around what’s being done in Copenhagen”.

“We are intending to do a strategic review of our operations later this year,” Kelly said. “And we can look at this as part of that.”

But finding space will be hard, Kelly said. “All our existing facilities are wedged, so it would be a challenge to squeeze anything further into the ones we have.”

Time is also an issue, said Social Democrats Councillor Catherine Stocker. A lot of people have every minute of their life packed with childcare, commuting, working, or whatever their responsibilities are.

“It’s hard to engage with new ways of doing things that might take slightly longer but be more rewarding,” Stocker said.

Like dropping things into a swap centre, or going there to browse and find some good bits, rather than ordering what you need online while commuting to work on the bus, or something like that.

Bringing in a four-day working week would give people more time to find ways to re-use, she said.