Impact wants bins collected by councils

The Impact trade union has called for green bin collection contracts held by private companies to be given to Dublin's four local authorities.

The union claims councils are better placed to provide a more frequent service at a lower cost to householders.

Impact national secretary Tom Brady said that since the introduction earlier this year of the pay-by-weight system households in Dublin were recycling more.

This meant the regular bin service in the capital's four local authority areas now has spare capacity which should be used to provide services now being delivered by private companies.

Mr Brady said that when the contracts held by private companies to lift green bins expire over the next two years local authority labour should be diverted into the service.

He also told a meeting of the union's municipal employees division executive in Waterford yesterday that organic waste collections, known as brown bins, should also be lifted by council staff when they are introduced over the next few years.

Impact has already rejected offers of talks on redundancy packages for cleansing staff in Dublin arguing that their jobs could be saved through redeployment. "Dublin taxpayers and residents have invested millions of euro in cleansing equipment and facilities," Mr Brady said.

"Why should that be thrown away when we have the staff, the capacity and the expertise to deliver new services? We welcome the switch to recycling that Dublin people have made, but we don't accept that it should mean job losses and wasted taxpayers' money," he said.

"The green bins went to a private contractor when the regular bin service was working at full capacity. That's changed and the private sector doesn't have the capacity to do a proper job on recycling collections now that everyone's recycling. Council staff should be redeployed to the green bins when the contracts come up for renewal.

"Impact firmly believes that council staff can do the job better and cheaper and we won't talk about redundancies - with all the cost and waste that implies for taxpayers and business - until we've been given a chance to prove it."

Mr Brady was speaking in Waterford at the second day of a three-day biennial Impact conference for the union's local authority and educational members. Delegates were also told the Government was using the public private partnership (PPP) model as a means of "privatising on the sly" a range of services which have traditionally been delivered by local authorities such as water and waste management.

Impact assistant general secretary Stephen O'Neill said: "Central government is increasingly denying local authorities funds for capital investment in crucial services like water and forcing them to turn to PPPs for virtually any kind of capital spending.

"We are not prepared to see the price and quality of our drinking water - or any other core service - in the hands of unaccountable private operators," he said.