Not long ago, a small group of teenagers from Rathfarnham in South Dublin, armed only with bin bags, set out for Marlay Park in search of rubbish they could turn into cold hard cash using 21st-century alchemy.
A few hours of walking the site of a concert that had taken place there the previous night yielded the gang of four 600 plastic bottles, which they quickly converted into €90.
It’s an enterprising and wholesome example of what Ciaran Foley, the chief executive of Re-turn, Ireland’s deposit return scheme, calls a “national movement” which he hopes will clean up the country and reduce our reliance on virgin plastic and fresh aluminium extracted from the earth at great environmental cost.
A less wholesome snapshot of the alchemy is seen in train stations in Dublin where Irish Rail has been putting up posters telling people not to reach into bins in search of bottles and cans and warning of the other dangers that might lurk within, including syringes, broken glass and dirty nappies.
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This week marks six months since the Re-turn scheme was rolled out, and while there have undoubtedly been bumps along the road, Foley cuts a relaxed figure as he sits in his Ballymount office reflecting on where things stand now and how this point has been reached.
“It has been a long six months but a good six months,” he says.
It might not have seemed like it was going to be a good six months last spring when the new system was being bedded down and Foley had to give multiple interviews to defend what were euphemistically referred to as “teething difficulties”.
“I wasn’t surprised by the [negative] reaction, my colleagues in the other schemes warned me,” Foley says. “I’m not a big social media user but my kids were telling me what was being said and I was worried. I’m glad we are sitting here now having this conversation.”
The scheme had many questions to answer in those early days. First it had to explain what it was and why it existed.
The first message was that it had to happen so Ireland could meet an EU-wide single-use plastics directive setting a recycling target for plastic bottles and cans of 77 per cent by next year and then 90 per cent by 2029. At the start of this year, Ireland was recycling about 60 per cent and with two billion qualifying containers going on the market in Ireland every year – just more than a billion plastic bottles and 900,000-plus aluminium cans. This meant that more than 600 million such receptacles were not being properly recycled every year and were instead ending up on the streets, in rivers, in the sea or in the atmosphere after incineration.
Another reason the scheme was introduced was to improve the quality of recycling material, allowing plastic bottles to be recycled up to seven times and aluminium cans recycled indefinitely.
There were also questions about the cost and the hassle.
A deposit of between 15 and 25 cent attached to cans and plastic bottles saw the price of a 1.5 litre bottle of Coke go from €3.25 to €3.50 while a 500ml bottle of Ballygowan water climbed from €1.19 to €1.34. A six-pack of the same product that cost €4 in your local Tesco on January 31st cost €4.90 a day later.
Of course, as the name of the scheme suggests, the additional charges did not really equate to a higher cost and deposits could be claimed back by the purchaser with ease – or so we were told. But it wasn’t always easy.
The system was three years in the making but could have fell apart in three months with many of the reverse vending machines that were supposed to suck in receptacles and spit out vouchers failing miserably.
“I have just spent over 90 minutes trying to return bottles for which my elderly mother was charged deposits. This is 90 minutes of my life I will never get back,” said one reader of The Irish Times who contacted the paper to express her frustration at malfunctioning machines.
The letters and emails flooded in to this paper and Joe Duffy’s Live Line lit up.
“We were surprised a little bit about the machines and we had to work really hard,” Foley says while stressing that “the technical faults are nonexistent” now.
He says the machines are “very busy [and] we could do with more and bigger machines and there are queues that we don’t want to see”.
The numbers are certainly looking better. There were two million containers returned in February, rising to about 3.2 million ever day in July with some weekend days coming close to four million.
Can and plastic bottle litter has decreased across towns and cities too, according to research from Irish Business Against Litter (Ibal). Indeed, the first national litter survey, conducted by An Taisce for Ibal, since the introduction of the Re-turn scheme reported that discarded cans fell by almost one-third while plastic bottle waste was less commonly found than in any previous survey.
“It’s early days and we’re still seeing too many plastic bottles on our streets, but we can expect further improvement as people become accustomed to the deposit return scheme and the legacy nonreturnable items are flushed out of the system,” Ibal said. “Ultimately, we should see can and plastic bottle litter disappear entirely.”
The issue of people rummaging through bins has been problematic.
Other countries have adapted bins to create separate areas for cans and bottles so people don’t potentially rifle through filth if in need of cash.
Foley says a prototype is being developed with Dublin City Council (DCC) with separate slots for cans and bottles. “I think that is a great idea. I am chasing it every day but I have to leave it to DCC.”
Re-turn has also been keen to bring charities on board through its Return for Children fundraising initiative in partnership with Barnardos Ireland, Barretstown, Childline by ISPCC, Jack & Jill, LauraLynn Children’s Hospice and Make-A-Wish Ireland.
Working with large-scale event organisers, the initiative offers people in attendance a chance to donate their used bottles and cans at designated Re-turn bins, with the cash equally divided between the six charities. There will be a high-profile presence at Electric Picnic and the National Ploughing Championships in the coming weeks.
While some gain from the deposit return scheme, the Irish Waste Management Association (IWMA) – which represents the companies – is unhappy and say its members are losing out on valuable cans and plastic bottles that people used to put in their green bins. It estimates the Re-turn scheme could cost them as much as €15 million a year in lost revenue.
[ Why the deposit return scheme may end up increasing your bin chargesOpens in new window ]
It seems likely that consumers will end up picking up the tab for that.
Foley swerves such questions. “I can’t get involved with where the IWMA are [and] we have no choice, we have to get the bottles and cans into the scheme.”
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