In Fingal, the council plans to hike fees at recycling centres

Fingal County Council officials are looking to raise charges at its two recycling facilities, at Coolmine in Dublin 15 and at The Estuary outside Swords.

For a car loaded with non-green waste – like mattresses and furniture – the cost to drop off there would almost double, from €16 to €30.

The changes are expected to come in on New Year’s Day, said Mary T. Daly, the council’s director of operations at the Balbriggan/Rush-Lusk/Swords Area Committee meeting on Thursday.

The council hasn’t upped its charges for 14 years, said Daly. But officials think it is now necessary, as the centres are running at a deficit of €1.8 million, she said.

They can’t let that gap grow, she says. Higher fees would also enable the council to extend opening times at its facility in Coolmine.

Councillors said they thought that almost doubling the cost in some cases was excessive. Especially if the council was looking to encourage more people to use the centres.

The growing number using the services is driving the need for some of the hike, said Daly. “The increased cost of the service is due to the increased activity, which far exceeds the income generated.”

What are the charges?

Daly had tried to increase the charges at Fingal’s recycling centres in 2022, she reminded councillors at the meeting.

“And councillors spent four hours giving out to me about it,” she said. So, fees had last gone up in 2010, she said.

Meanwhile, expenditure had grown by 52 percent between 2015 and 2023, which relates to staff wages, she said. “They are open Monday to Saturday.”

The council’s expenditure also included minor contracts, contractors taking away non-recyclable items and costs in Coolmine for security, she said.

Coolmine is open from 9am to 4pm, while The Estuary runs from 8am to 8pm, and there is pressure for the council to extend Coolmine’s hours, she said. “The increase in charges will help us fund that.”

Demand is high. Between 2018 and 2023, the number of cars going into the two centres went from 290,000 cars to 346,000, she said.

And more than 92,000 cars went into the centres in 2022 and didn’t pay anything, she said. “And that’s wonderful.”

Cars bringing in certain goods that are recyclable such as paper, cardboard, clothes and cooking oil don’t have to pay.

But nearby centres in other council areas charge a gate fee of €4. Fingal was an outlier in this respect, she said, but no such additional charge would be added to either centre.

For non-green waste, like wood, metal and bulky items such as mattresses and furniture, the new charges for filled car boots would rise from €8 to €12.

For entire cars, it would rise from €16 to €30. And, for estate cars or jeeps, it would go from €16 to €32.

For car vans, the jump is from €40 to €50. For transit vans, the fee will stay steady at €128.

Meanwhile for green waste, the charges for filled car boots will go from €4 to €6. For cars, from €8 to €10. For estate cars or jeeps, from €24 to €35. For cars plus a trailer, from €24 to €35 – while vans will also stay put at €80.

Despite the charges, the council would never break even with funding either centre, she said. “The expenditure will always be above the income.”

Encouraging recycling

The increase in costs was a lot, particularly for those using the centres regularly, said Sinn Féin Councillor Ann Graves.

She said she thought they should be encouraging people to use it more and take the hit to funding.

“Because the cost for clearing up rubbish and fly-tipping around the county is quite expensive as well,” she said.

On Tuesday, Sinn Féin Councillor Malachy Quinn said that the price of a car going from €16 to 30 for non-green waste is a concerning anomaly. “It’s just not going to encourage small-scale recycling that we need to do.”

That smaller-scale recycling is necessary to prevent the type of fly-tipping that goes on in Balbriggan, he says.

Graves also said that she thinks the rates do run the risk of encouraging illegal dumping.

“You look at the period during Covid where people are locked down, and there is widespread dumping because people couldn’t afford bin charges,” she says.

A spokesperson for Fingal County Council did not respond when asked if it had found any correlation between the two.

Charging for waste doesn’t necessarily lead to a rise in the rate of fly-tipping, according to a study by the Waste and Resource Action Programme, an environmental action non-government organisation based out of the United Kingdom.

The study looked at 301 of the 317 local authorities in England, 132 of which operated some type of charge at a household waste recycling centre.

It found that these fees did not have a statistically significant association with a growth in illegal dumping.

Graves said she was also surprised that the charges were not being brought back to the Transport and Infrastructure Strategic Policy Committee.

“Because it was they that deferred it [in 2022] on the basis of increasing costs, particularly in the time of a cost of living crisis,” she said. They should look at it again, she said.

Daly, the council’s director of operations, said she didn’t know what relevance that policy committee has when it comes to charges. “This is an executive function.”

The charges are being included in the budget in December, she said. Councillors have to vote on the budget, to approve it.