In the Seanad on 5 November 2003, during a debate on Waste Management, I said:

I want to focus on the hot topic of the day, the dispute about refuse charges. Nine months ago to the day, when we discussed the Environment Bill 2003, I made the point that waste charges for householders should always be related directly to the amount of waste they put out to be collected. At the time the Minister suggested it was enough to provide in the Bill for local authorities to have the power to do this, rather than requiring them to do so. In view of the widespread trouble in collecting these charges, more attention needs to be paid to this aspect of the matter.

I support the principle of waste charges at household level. The main argument for charging at that level rather than including the cost in general taxation is that individual charges can establish a link between a person's behaviour and the amount that he or she pays. They are, or they should be, based on the principle that the user pays. The importance of the approach is that, if properly structured - it is not fully structured yet - the user pays for a service in proportion to the extent that he or she uses it. The more of the service people use, the more they pay, which is the cardinal principle of this approach. This gives users an element of control over how much they pay.

I have a neighbour who lives on her own, is very careful about what she does and only uses her bin once every four weeks. In our house we fill it every week and pay for it.

By reducing their use of the service, people should be able to reduce the amount they pay. This system allows us to put a brake on the extent to which services are drawn on. If a service is free, users have no incentive to restrict their use of it. This is why the European Union is so keen on having this kind of scheme as well as metered water charges. It wants paying for the system to be structured in such a way that people have a constant incentive to use the resource more carefully.

Paying for waste services at householder level has an inbuilt motivational factor. We charge for these services at local level to encourage people to use the services sparingly. Individual householders have a number of choices over how they dispose of their waste. They can throw it out, which in effect means putting it out for collection, or they can sort through the waste and select some of it for recycling through bottle banks, green bins, etc. In the case of organic waste, they can compost it and use the compost in their gardens to help the growth of flowers or vegetables. From a national waste management point of view, we have an interest in what choices they make. The more they recycle and the more they compost the better. The less they put out for collection by the local authority the better.

It is vital that we structure our system so as to encourage the use that we want. This comes down to a matter of how the collection services are charged. I will give an example of how this can work. In Fingal we have bins and we pay for a label to attach to them each week. We also have a green bin that is collected once a month free of charge. In several parts of the country waste collection has been privatised. In County Wicklow special bags are sold in local shops and the price of the bag includes the cost of collecting the refuse. The company collecting the rubbish only picks up its own bags and ignores anything else. This system has is an inbuilt incentive to use it sparingly. Every time someone uses a bag, he or she pays for it. In Wicklow each bag costs €1.50 to €2, so the more rubbish someone puts out in these bags, the more he or she has to pay. More importantly, the less rubbish someone puts out, the less he or she pays.

A resident of Wicklow explained to me that within a month of the system starting he found that his household had drastically cut down on the amount of rubbish it put out, almost without thinking about it. Up to then, he had sorted out stuff for recycling whenever he remembered to do it. Now he found he was religiously putting aside stuff for recycling all the time, because he had an incentive to do it. Similarly, he now had an incentive to maintain a compost heap in his garden and feed it with organic waste.

A considerable number of my supermarket customers ask me why we put certain products in plastic packaging as they cannot get rid of it. Customers never raised this before and have only started to do so in the past year when they became obliged to pay for the waste and they begrudge spending the money. This shows the system is working. In providing for local waste charges, we must do it in such a way as to give the householder the incentives to behave in this way. If we do not, we miss the most important point of having local charges.

My objective is to support the Government in its determination to have these charges collected. However, I want to urge it to reconsider how the charges are structured and collected. While in certain parts of the country there is an annual charge, this does not work unless it is related to the amount of rubbish collected.

There is inconsistency in dealing with the issue of the ability of householders to pay the charges. We all agree that people who do not have the means should get a waiver. However, apparently waivers only apply in some areas and not across the board. This is clearly iniquitous, and should be fixed immediately.

I am concerned about the notion of collecting these charges on a yearly basis. Doing so presents the householder with one big bill, which is much more difficult to cope with than many smaller bills at regular intervals. More importantly, it increases the distance between the action he or she takes and the need to pay for it. If something done now has to be paid for a year down the road, that is one thing. It is another and much stronger thing if what is done now has to be paid for this week. In my case I have to buy tags to put on bins each week.

I am also concerned at the expense of collecting these charges. Most local authorities seem to be collecting the charges in exactly the same way as they used to collect residential rates, when they existed. Under such an arrangement the cost of collecting the charge will become a significant amount of the charge itself. Apart from the waste of resources, I can see it making the charge even less popular than it would otherwise be.

It seems that collecting the tax through a charge on special bags, tags or labels that are sold through local shops is inherently a much more cost-effective way of raising the money as well as possibly being seen as less painful for those who have to pay for it. By focusing on the bags or tags that are used for collection, we should also allow for a system in which the local authority could eventually itself take responsibility for collecting goods for recycling. Some authorities, including Fingal, are already doing that with monthly green bin collections.

We have often heard about how in Germany and the Netherlands people put out not one but several different coloured bins for collection, each one containing a different kind of rubbish, which is treated in a different kind of way. Repak has already taken the first steps in this area. We could introduce such a scheme here and make it work by differential pricing on the various bags that are used.

The Government could make the system of refuse charges more acceptable to everyone if it did three things. The system of waivers for people who cannot pay, currently only available in some areas, must be available everywhere. The charges must be directly related to the amount of refuse the householder puts out for collection, which is not happening in all cases. It must be possible to pay the charge ''as you go", rather than having to face a big bill at the end of the year. If the Government takes those actions, we will face up to the challenge and there will be greater acceptance among householders, who are having difficulty putting forward an alternative.