Waste management: The key to a safe future

PENN, Ireland, June 19 (Reuters) – Ireland’s Government will scrap a waste management system which it says wastes money but does little to protect the environment and is ineffective.
Pennystar Waste Management has been running waste collection stations at the PENN airport in south west Ireland for decades.
It was set up by a partnership between a Dublin-based company and the Irish National Waste Management Association (INWA) in 2006.
It aims to collect and dispose of waste in a secure, non-hazardous way and to reduce the amount of waste generated by landfill.
Ireland’s waste management plans, which will be published on Friday, will include a new system that will be implemented by 2020.
The system collects and disposes waste in accordance with European directives but not all countries follow the same guidelines, said INWA president Peter Ryan.
Ryan said that in Ireland the system had been “ineffective, wasteful and expensive” with waste generated exceeding €1 million per year.
Ireland has collected nearly 1.5 billion tonnes of waste since it joined the European Union in 2004, according to INWA.
Ireland collects around 20 percent of its waste from landfill and has had some success in reducing waste by recycling it, Ryan said.
Penn, an island town of about 3,000 people, has been dealing with a huge increase in the amount and size of rubbish that has accumulated in the port city’s port for years.
The port is an important source of food and drink for residents, especially the younger generation, Ryan added.
The Irish Government says the system has collected a total of 2.5 million tonnes of garbage from landfill in the past five years.
But waste management experts said it did little to address the problems caused by waste, and that the system was not efficient or effective.
Ryan, from the Institute of Environmental Studies, said the waste management model used in PENN had failed.
“It’s very costly and inefficient,” he said.
“This has had a huge impact on waste management, particularly on our landfill.
It’s been very costly to develop and it’s not effective.
We’ve seen waste being stored in our landfills and we’ve seen the amount that’s being produced in terms of landfill being quite significant.”PENN is one of three port sites in Ireland that use a waste collection system.
The other sites are on Parnell in Cork and in Derry.
Ryan acknowledged that the waste system had the potential to reduce landfill emissions and improve the environment.
He said the current waste management plan had failed to address a number of issues such as the lack of infrastructure, lack of training, and poor oversight.
“The waste management planning that was in place was not working and it was not going to improve the situation for people,” Ryan said in a statement.”PENN’s waste collection model has been in place for over a decade and has resulted in an average waste collection capacity of about 1.4 million tonnes per year, but waste collection is not the most efficient or efficient method of waste collection.”
Ryan said the plan to scrap the waste collection systems at PENN would not affect port operations, the port’s annual business plan or any plans for any port projects.
Ryan called on INWA to immediately cease its legal battle against the Government, which he said had been unsuccessful in its attempts to block the plans.