Three years ago, when we were first warned of an impending waste management crisis, few could have imagined it would become one of the hottest political issues, with councillors squirming over the location of disposal sites and, in Dublin's case, even the introduction of modest household charges.
BSE waste and the build-up of 250,000 tonnes of meat-and-bone meal in the short term are about to concentrate their minds further.
But nobody could be under the illusion there isn't already a crisis as local authorities are forced to close dumps that no longer meet environmental standards and the cost of meeting those standards soars. Dublin Corporation faces a bill of £8.7 million for waste disposal in 2001, up by a staggering 66 per cent on last year.
The Dublin City Manager, Mr John Fitzgerald, put this in context last week when he pointed out that a 1 per cent increase in commercial rates would yield about £1 million.
Not only would this be well below the increase in disposal costs, but it wouldn't even make a dent in funding the corporation's door-to-door recycling programme.
Yet the city council is going right to the wire, risking dissolution for failing to adopt a budget for 2001, on the issue of introducing household refuse charges. Such were the fears among many Fianna Fail and Labour councillors that this would hand a political bonus to Sinn Fein they were prepared to throw rationality out the window.
But Mr Fitzgerald says he is confident of a positive outcome when the council holds its seventh meeting on this highly fraught issue next Friday. If so, at least one of the key elements of the three-year-old regional waste management strategy will finally be in place; for without household charges it cannot be funded.
Even if the Dublin local authorities - and others with similar intentions - achieve an impossibly ambitious target of reducing the waste mountain by 60 per cent through minimisation and recycling efforts, everybody knows there will always be a residue requiring disposal in landfill sites or thermal treatment plants, commonly known as incinerators.
Here, too, there is an absence of political will. Though councillors throughout the State have enjoyed trips to Copenhagen, Vienna and other European cities to inspect waste disposal facilities - and were generally impressed by what they saw - within weeks of coming home, many voted against plans for similar installations in their own bailiwicks.
There is no doubt that public fears about incineration need to be assuaged - and not just for municipal waste. Industry favours an incinerator for hazardous wastes and there are proposals to burn the carcasses of some 400,000 cattle - ironically, in order to restore public confidence in beef against the backdrop of BSE.
One of the few companies specialising in this area, Florida-based Air Burners Inc, claims its patented air curtain incineration systems can safely and efficiently deal with waste material, including BSE-infected carcasses. These mobile installations can be set up anywhere and have been used to destroy entire herds of diseased cattle.
Waste-to-energy plants, involving the mass-burn of municipal refuse to produce electricity, have been put forward for several locations under the regional waste management plans. According to their proponents, they would all be state-of-the-art facilities complying fully with EU air pollution limits, both existing and proposed.
They point out that countries with the highest environmental standards in Europe, such as Austria and Denmark, burn most of their residual waste after abstracting as much recyclable material as possible, with the energy generated by the process used to fuel district heating schemes. In both countries, this has won a high level of public consent.
But environmental groups remain strongly opposed to incineration for a number of reasons, not least the danger from dioxins, which are by-products from burning chlorine-based materials such as PVC. Dioxins can be extremely toxic even at very low doses and they take a long time to break down.
Groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are also concerned about the ash left by waste incineration, which may contain dioxins as well as dangerous heavy metals such as cadmium, lead and mercury. And since most of this ash goes to landfill for disposal, the pollutants it contains could eventually leak into groundwater.
Another criticism levelled at incineration is that it acts as a disincentive to recycling. Because of high capital costs, privately-run incinerator operators would require contracts with local authorities to supply a minimum amount of waste to burn or incur financial penalties for their failure to do so, as has happened in the UK.
That's one of the main reasons the Dublin City Manager believes it is vital to proceed as quickly as possible with a comprehensive recycling programme in the region, long in advance of building a thermal treatment facility. Compared to our European counterparts, we're not at the races in minimising and recycling waste.
Mr Fitzgerald accepts that waste incineration cannot be foisted on people without taking account of legitimate fears. Dublin Corporation has already set up an office in Ringsend, near the proposed incinerator site at Poolbeg, to liase with the community in advance of preparing an environmental impact statement on the project.
Given its long lead-time, the technology we will eventually adopt for waste treatment in Dublin has probably not been developed yet, he says. No option is being excluded, such as the system pioneered by Herhof, a German company, which recovers recyclable materials without the need for expensive door-to-door collection.
But even if Ireland makes the giant leap from near zero to 60 per cent recycling over the next few years, there will be a continuing need for disposal sites, including new landfills. And as EU environmental standards become even more stringent, the only certainty is that the costs of coping with a throwaway society will keep on soaring.