Anti-bin tax meeting in Phibsboro

by Acidburn Mon Jun 09, 2003 00:19

when they stop collecting bins, double bag your rubbish (can get smelly in the car), pop down to the Dail or local council building and simply leave it at the gates. There. Simple. Using direct action to voice your opinion AND getting rid of your rubbish. Two birds with one stone.

by Frank Mon Jun 09, 2003 09:48

If I don't have a car! Your direct action always equates to the small group of organised activists. If an individual tries this sort of action you'd be done for littering.
Get real, organise the many not the few.

by Acidburn Mon Jun 09, 2003 10:47

& I didnt intend for anyone to take my comment too seriously. But organise and mobolise. Frank, what would YOU like to see done?

by Bemused Mon Jun 09, 2003 15:23

What's so wrong with waste charges? I feel 'polluter pays' is an excellent way of pursuing environmental law. One only has to look as far as the plastic bag tax. Irish householders are not shelling out hundreds of euros every year now on plastic bags. We simply stopped using them. It's a safe bet that if charges are introduced on the basis of the amount of waste you generate and the difficulty of disposing of it, householders will be doing their level best to lower the amount of waste they produce, thus easing the landfill problem and paying less in the process.

by XRAY Mon Jun 09, 2003 15:33

The attempt to introduce refuse charges by the Dublin area county councils has been welcomed in some quarters. It is, we are told, necessary to fund a local waste management policy, that will increase the amount of waste recycled, and reduce the amount of landfill needed.

AN UNFAIR TAX

At first glance this makes sense as a way of making the polluters pay for the cost of their waste. But when it comes to local charges there's one problem - we've already paid. When council charges were abolished in the 70's they were replaced with an increase in other taxes. The extra money this raised for the government was supposed to be passed back to the councils, but wasn't. Is it our fault Charlie McCreevy's tight? Even if the VAT increase was withdrawn, there's another huge problem with passing the cost of waste back to us - we're not the polluters. Of the 42 million tonnes of waste produced every year in Ireland, less than 5% is household waste. Three-quarters of it comes from farmers, the other 20% from industry. If we're going to follow the 'polluter pays' principle, we're the last people who should have to cough up, but apparently PAYE workers, who already pay an unfair proportion of taxes, are just going to have to pay some more.

So the charges are not targeted at those who produce the most waste, but will they lead to a better waste policy? At the moment incineration plays a large part in council plans. But, as they have discovered around the country, people will not allow incinerators to be built in their areas. There are simply too many questions about the dioxins produced by incineration, some of which have been linked to cancer. The other option is recycling.
RECYCLING

The four Dublin councils say they plan to recycle 60% of their waste (5% is recycled at the moment). But how committed are they to the idea? At almost the same time as Dún Laoghaire/Rathdown council announced the introduction of refuse charges, the Kerbside recycling company went bust. Apparently the council didn't think recycling was important enough to give Kerbside the small subsidy it needed to keep going. Of course, we'd end up paying for it either way - either in increased refuse charges to keep the recycling companies profitable, or in higher taxes to subsidise those companies.

If the councils plan to recycle waste, it's because they see it as the easiest option, the one that is most likely to win public support. They hope that we will be less likely to complain about refuse charges if they seem to have a 'green' policy. But still, why are we the ones paying for it?

We have little choice in the (small) amount of waste we produce. Unless we change our lifestyles drastically, we will have to buy the same products from the same companies, with all the excess packaging they include. We have no control over this packaging - you can't go to the supermarket and ask for a refill of your jar of coffee, or bottle of washing-up liquid. The decision to wrap food in a bag in a box in a bag is not ours - we're not the polluters.
PROFIT OR ENVIRONMENT?

There is a fundamental conflict between our desire for a clean environment and the greed of businesses for profit. As well as unnecessary packaging, businesses spend over 400 billion dollars a year on advertising, to try to persuade us to buy their products instead of their competitors' near-identical product - how much energy, how many resources, are consumed by this industry that produces nothing useful? In industry, companies will happily ignore the pollution they create if it helps keep costs down. It has its own jargon - 'externalising costs' - in other words, putting the cost of pollution onto the outside community. This is all done with the connivance of government. In the mid 1990's governments met to decide a response to global warming, and agreed a treaty that was supposed to reduce the number of greenhouse gases produced. But these were not the strict limits some of us imagined at the time, because it allows richer countries to buy pollution allowances from countries that don't use them. As usual, these laws are for the poor, they don't apply to the rich.

In this context, the issue of domestic waste is almost irrelevant. It accounts for only a tiny fraction of the overall level of waste, and even that fraction isn't really under our control. But it is this fraction that the government focuses on, telling us we are all equally to blame for the state of the environment, using it as an excuse to raise our taxes and distract us from the real causes of pollution.

Instead of feeling guilty for not recycling teabags, we must act to stop the real causes of pollution. In the refuse charges campaign, this means arguing that the real polluters should pay for the waste disposal, not the workers who already pay enough tax. It means stopping companies from passing on the cost of their pollution to us. It means taking society back, so that we organise production based on need, not profit, and stop using our environment as a dumping ground.

by Bemused Mon Jun 09, 2003 15:47

Double taxation is a poor argument against. It's already been used to defeat a proposal for property taxes on the wealthy and waste charges shouldn't fall to it. Governments will get what they need from income tax from us. So if we don't pay the bin charges, we'll pay it one way or another. Having a charge that you could control yourself is a better option. Householders should be charged on volume and type of waste.

As for industry, firms have already been paying waste charges on the polluter pays principle for a number of years now, via trade waste charges and trade effluent charges.

As for farmers, I don't know where the 80% figure comes from. Coming from a farming background, I find this hard to believe.

by Cleaver Mon Jun 09, 2003 17:00

If people do decide to leave their rubbish at the door of Dublin City Council, or corpo, make sure that there is nothing to indicate whose rubbish it is, envelopes, bills etc. This may seem a bit obvious but the litter wardens have been known to get their hands dirty rooting through dumped bags from time to time.

by Gregor Kerr - Campaign Against Refuse Charges Mon Jun 09, 2003 21:45 binthebill at eircom dot net 087-6996046

There are at least 4 good reasons to oppose the imposition of the bin tax by local Councils.
1. They are UNDEMOCRATIC. The Councillors who voted for these charges have absolutely no mandate to do so. No political party in the last local or general elections declared themselves in favour of a new local tax. On the last occasion on which there was an attempt to introduce local taxation, the water charges were decisively defeated by the people of Dublin and elsewhere.
2. They are HARMFUL TO THE ENVIRONMENT. The hidden agenda behind these charges is the privatisation of the refuse collection service. In many parts of the country, this has already happened, and the intention is to have the service privatised in the large urban areas as well. This must be seen in the context of the government's plans to build a number of incinerators around the country for the disposal of rubbish. If this is allowed to happen, we can forget about any decent recycling scheme being put in place. If someone is making money out of collecting rubbish and someone (probably the same company ) is making money out of burning it, why would there be any attempt to reduce the amount of waste. In fact, that company would probably be able to argue that by introducing recycling, their ability to make a profit was being interfered with (Crazier things have happened in the world of capitalism!!). Anyone genuinely interested in seeing a proper waste management plan (ie reducing, recycling and reusing) put in place must oppose the drive towards privatisation, of which the introduction of charges is a part. At any rate, as was pointed out by someone else, households produce just 5% of all waste, and more than half of the waste we do produce is unwanted packaging that we have no option but to take home from the supermarket. BTW if anyone thinks the Councils/government are in the least bit interested in recycling, remember that they closed down the only glass bottle recycling plant in the state at the same time as they were bringing in this new tax.
3. They are UNJUST. PAYE workers pay 80% of all the tax in the State. Big business pays proportionally far less tax than ordinary workers. Most workers pay either 20% or 40% tax on their incomes, as well as VAT and other indirect taxes. Corporation tax on profits are just 12%. AIB and Bank of Ireland are making obscene profits (something like 3million Euros a day each). Tax them, tax the multinational companies, tax the rich bastards with the offshore accounts, tax the stud farm owners. We're already paying enough.
4. This is JUST THE BEGINNING. If the Councils get away with imposing this tax, how much will we be paying in a few years time? Already the charge in Sligo is 500Euros a year. Cullen, the Minister for the Environment, has said that local taxes of up to 1,000Euros per annum per household is what they are ultimately aiming to introduce.

The water charges were defeated by a campaign of people power - refusing to pay and organising in local areas to resisit and support those non-payers the Council picked on. We need to do the same again.