Inside a Dublin recycling centre: ‘We get some strange material. Recently we had a firearm’

The job being done by the men stationed close to the entrance of the Panda waste facility in Ballymount is by any conceivable measure grim and it is made all the more so by the carelessness of too many Dubliners.

The dozen wearing high-viz jackets and face masks stand somewhat morosely by a thunderously loud conveyor belt sifting through the detritus of the city, sorting it into funnels and watching out for rogue materials.

When they are done, the recyclable waste makes its way along more than 1km of conveyor belts to be sorted into various piles including aluminium, cardboard and Tetra Pak before being shipped to plants across the developed world to be turned into something new.

If those who generated the waste did what they were supposed to, the job these men do would not be quite so grim, but by not simply rinsing out those milk, coleslaw and yoghurt containers or by sneaking the odd dirty nappy into the recycling bin, city dwellers ensure the men have to deal with an unholy and sometimes stinking mess before the recycling process can even start.

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But when it does start in earnest it is a sight to behold.

The mountain of waste at the entrance to the Panda facility dwarfs the full-size digger that is moving it with alacrity towards the conveyor belt maze so it can start its new journey.

David Tobin is an environmental scientist and the head of sustainability for the Beauparc Group, of which Panda is a part, and he’s almost evangelical about his role.

[ ‘We’re the original recyclers on the island’ ]

First, he explains what happens at the Ballymount Material Recovery Facility. “When we take the contents of recycling bins into our trucks, we bring them here and we sort them into single-stream materials which are then sent on for onward recycling.”

From the outside it does not look promising but Tobin insists that we are standing outside a ‘sophisticated plant’

The depot caters for the larger Dublin area and the recyclable rubbish from more than 440,000 homes comes through the gates weekly. It is licensed by the Environmental Protection Agency to accept 100,000 tonnes a year which, he says, makes it the largest such facility in the State.

From the outside, it does not look promising but Tobin insists that we are standing outside a “sophisticated plant”. He talks about optical separators, robotics, machine learning and the buzzword of our time, artificial intelligence. “We also have a lot of people,” he continues.

“It’s really important to get the maximum amount of material or resource value out of this,” he says.

Beside the environmental scientist is the aptly named Saran Greene, a mechanical engineer and the general manager of the facility.

After a brief induction and the donning of protective gear he takes us on a tour.

[ The Irish Times view on the new recycling scheme: people’s buy-in must be won ]

First up is the entry hall: a giant warehouse where 300 tonnes of recyclable material has been piled high.

The Irish Times asks how long it takes to accumulate that amount of rubbish.

“About a day,” says Greene.

We are sure we have misheard as it seems like an outlandishly large number but he repeats the figure and while it is undoubtedly big, it is dwarfed by the 3.2 million tonnes of municipal waste Ireland generates every year.

The set-up we are looking at is reminiscent of the scene in Toy Story 3 when the heroes get to spend a day in some class of waste facility

We are getting better at managing it, however, and according to Central Statistics Office(CSO) data, 74 per cent of our waste ended up in landfill in 2001 compared to 16 per cent in 2021. The recovery rate of packaging waste in Ireland increased from 25 per cent in 2001 to more than 90 per cent now.

The set-up we are looking at is reminiscent of the scene in Toy Story 3 when the heroes get to spend a day in some class of waste facility (no spoilers here),

Tobin is quick to correct us. “I think that involved an incinerator.” (Okay maybe some spoilers) “The whole purpose of what we’re trying to do here is avoid incineration. Everything that you see behind you is going to be recycled.”

As the tour continues, Greene talks about some of the strange things the crews have found of late. “Just before Christmas we had a firearm and had to call the Armed Response Unit to come out and deal with it, so we do tend to get some strange pieces of material in the recycling bins. We get camping gas canisters, which causes a serious, serious problem. They are a real hazard but the big problem at the moment is lithium-ion batteries from the likes of vapes. They are a fire hazard too.”

We want to go back to the gun business but the whistle-stop tour has moved on and so has Greene.

After the human interactions with the material at the entrance to the plant, the machines take over. Larger pieces of cardboard are sent one way, plastics go another. Tin cans are lifted off the belts by magnets and fired off to where they need to be, while electrical currents take aluminium cans to a different place.

Another belt has optical sensors which determine if the material has a reflection which would indicate that it is plastic and if it does it is fired in one direction and if it doesn’t, it goes another way, aided by jets of air.

Then there are the robotic arms which seek out Tetra Pak material.

Finally, we end up in the baling shed where all the plastic, paper, cardboard, aluminium and more are neatly stacked and ready to be shipped to various parts of the world to be repurposed.

The material here has value but it’s not just the economic value of it. This is real environmental value. It would take about five tonnes of CO2 to extract this aluminium whereas this is five tonnes saved

—  Environmental scientist David Tobin

Tobin points to bales and bales of aluminium cans. “Each one of those is 500kg of aluminium and that is all perfectly ready to be recycled. It is 500kg of aluminium that doesn’t have to be mined,” he says.

He gestures to the piles of ready-to-ship cardboard. “We have seen a big increase in online deliveries and that has led to a big increase in cardboard. We’re capturing that here and it is recycled so you can’t think of it as rubbish. It is trees that don’t have to be harvested. The material here has value but it’s not just the economic value of it. This is real environmental value. It would take about five tonnes of CO2 to extract this aluminium whereas this is five tonnes saved. This is absolutely critical. For the circular economy, for the environment, for a net-zero future we have to get as much out of the waste stream as we possibly can.”

While Ballymount is where much of the recyclable waste Dublin products end up, Ballymun is where its journey often starts.

That is the site of a fairly new and expansive Dublin City Council bring centre that is also managed by Panda.

When The Irish Times shows up, it is a hive of activity with people unloading cars full of what had value before becoming junk and now starting on the road to value again.

A man throws a large plate glass window into one skip while another takes what looks like a forest of freshly cut branches from the back of his car to chuck into another.

“This is from my neighbour’s tree, it’s overhanging my garden so I am allowed to cut it back but if he looked after it properly I wouldn’t have to,” he says grumpily.

Tobin has a keen eye for what people are discarding and notices a teak chair in one skip. Then he spots the matching table in another skip. It has value but once it comes on to this site it is legally waste. Now and then the staff rescue things for their own use.

Two good-looking office chairs are sitting in the smoking shelter used by the workers.

“I’d say those chairs are better quality than my own office chair,” Tobin says.

Sometimes he sees things in the skips that sadden him — things like the chopper bike he would have killed for as a child

But generally speaking, when things come in here they are not reused. “We live in a linear economy, you go and you buy your stuff in the shops, you use it and it is thrown in the bin. We have to change, we have to get to this circular economy where things are reused or at the very least recycled,” he says. “It’s fundamental to carbon reduction. It’s fundamental to so many things on the environmental side,” he adds.

Sometimes he sees things in the skips that sadden him — things like the chopper bike he would have killed for as a child.

“We see everything from professional golf clubs to professional racing bicycles. People are busy and they don’t have time to go to charity shops. There are a lot of house clearances and we might see really nice furniture or granny’s prize silverware. Once it comes over our weighbridge it is legally waste.”

Sid Daly is the public domain officer with waste management at Dublin City Council and looks after multiple smaller bring centres and three recycling centres — here in Ballymun, North Strand and Ringsend.

“We take a much larger range of things here, everything from rubble and paint to garden materials, wood, glass and more. We all are aware of climate action and climate change and recycling is one of the most basic positive forms of climate action,” he says.

He is a relatively newbie in the space having started in early 2020 “two weeks before Covid hit. It was a fairly steep learning curve because of course, we had all our facilities open during the pandemic and were one of the only things that people could do. It seemed like people were taking the kids out for the day to the recycling centre.”

He is keenly aware of the problem of fly-tipping and while recycling centres such as this one give people an environmental and free alternative to simply dumping their waste, he knows it will happen irrespective of the facilities put in place.

“If people are going to fly tip they are probably going to do it anyway. Across the road from this bring centre you have fly-tipping going on. But I think most people are aware of recycling centres and are fortunate enough to have a household waste collection and recycling bins themselves so I think most people do want to recycle.”

Trevor Maher is the co-ordinator of waste management services and is based at the North City Operations Depot which has sites adjacent to the recycling centre. “We have moved eight different departments in and waste management alone have moved four different shifts in from two depots,” he says.

The depot has large compactors which handle the city’s public bins, the sweepings from the roads and everything that is illegally dumped around the capital. All day, every day, trucks full of rubbish come and go leaving up to 26 tonnes of rubbish behind each day.

“Thorntons [recycling company] recover what they can out of it and the rest of it goes to landfill,” he says.

All my peelings and my eggshells go into my compost heap and I have so many different bins in my house. I am ridiculous really

—  Collins Avenue resident Margaret Cleary

Margaret Cleary from Collins Avenue is not a fan of landfill. She might be a poster child for the proper management of household waste and is here to recycle cardboard and glass.

“I don’t believe in sending stuff to landfill if it can be recycled, reused or repurposed in some way,” she says. “All my peelings and my eggshells go into my compost heap and I have so many different bins in my house. I am ridiculous really.”

She knows she’s not ridiculous really and she also knows “there’s a cohort of people who just will just turn a blind eye and just put it in a black bin”.

Fern Gallagher from Glasnevin is not one of them.

“We are hoping to move house quite soon so we’re doing a dung out before we put it on the market.

A what?

“A dung out,” she repeats.

For readers who have not googled the phrase, it’s New Zealander for clearout.

She only discovered the centre in recent days.

“We were having lunch in Ikea the other day and we looked out the window and it appeared like a mirage in the desert. So that’s why I’m here today,” she says.

“We’re clearing out all of our cupboards, attic, everything like that so we’ve lots and lots of stuff. We’d rather put it here because some of the stuff we have may not be quite good enough for charity shops. But we’d hope that could be of use somewhere else.

“My husband likes to hoard boxes. So boxes of old electrical things, lots of stuff like that. Wires, plugs, all kinds of electrical components. We’ve no idea what they were, old T-shirts, toys, anything you can think of. Every time we go on holidays we buy a new adaptor and we’ve discovered about 70 or so. We want to make sure everything’s disposed of correctly as well. Our shed was full of tonnes of old paint pots and everything like that and we know we need to dispose of them correctly.”

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