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Cormac Fitzgerald Rockin' the Suburbs

In this series, journalist and spoken word artist Cormac Fitzgerald travels to a different town or suburb each week to write about the gigs and cultural experiences you rarely see covered by Irish media outlets. 

This week’s subject: A tour of the Poolbeg Incinerator.

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AN EMPTY RED packet of Doritos, a pink bucket hat, some plastic plates, crushed boxes, strips of fabric, clothes and other textiles are a small fraction of the things that stand out on the tumbling mountains of waste in the Dublin Waste to Energy Facility in Poolbeg.

The rolling hills of rubbish sit in the waste storage bunker like polluted ski slopes. As we look on from the viewing area, trucks appear like beetles at regular intervals at entry points down below, tipping yet more waste into the chamber, and cranes work to sort through and rearrange the vast piles of rubbish. 

“No waste is wasted,” our guide tells us, as the claw crane automatically works through the endless piles.

I am on a tour of the facility with a large group as part of the Open House Dublin festival of architecture, which is organised by the Irish Architecture Foundation (IAF).

The annual festival facilitates visits by the public to notable Dublin buildings. This year’s programme includes the sort of venues you’d expect to come across, like the Pepper Canister church, the Four Courts and the Gate Theatre.

It’s safe to say that an incinerator might have slightly more niche appeal. But the Dublin Waste to Energy Facility – known as the Poolbeg Incinerator – is certainly a notable building and will be familiar to many people. A large, sleek, futuristic looking structure, it sits at the edge of Ringsend on the eastern outskirts of the city. 

Dubliners will be familiar with its design – inspired by the shape of a conch shell – and with the large plumes of filtered emissions that it belches out into the sky every day, just a short distance from the iconic red and white Poolbeg towers. 

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Outside the facility, down below, large boats pass by, dispensing containers into Dublin Port. At the incinerator, the cargo is delivered by truck from all over Dublin as well as other eastern regions and it is all waste.

The DWtE first started operating almost 10 years ago in 2017, after many years of planning consultations, delays and fierce objections from concerned local residents and environmental groups. 

It is a public private partnership, involving Dublin City Council (DCC) and the private sector. The facility was formerly controlled by energy-from-waste operator Encyclis, but its stake was recently sold to a UK pension fund, which controls it with a number of other international groups.

It is operated on a day-to-day basis by Kanadevia Inova, and employs 60 full-time staff, operating 24 hours a day (though it can only accept waste on weekdays and Saturdays between certain hours).

The facility takes in waste from the four Dublin local authorities, as well as other locations in the midlands and the east of the country. It processes and burns “residual waste”, essentially anything that is left over after recyclables have been taken out.

If you are living in Dublin, and you throw your waste into the black bin, the chances are it will end up here in the storage bunker, ready to be burnt.

Often recyclable materials like plastic end up in the general waste pile, and are combusted alongside residual waste. In recent years, one of the key issues facing the facility is the increase in disposable plastic vapes being thrown into general bins.

These vapes often contain lithium batteries that can ignite or explode under pressure and cause fires in bin trucks and waste sorting facilities.

According to figures from Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Ireland, 23.6 million vapes sold last year in Ireland were thrown away into household bins rather than being disposed of properly. Many of these can end up in facilities like the one in Poolbeg, where they can cause serious issues.

Touring the facility

So how does the process work?

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You fill your household bin with all sorts of non-recyclable daily waste: tin foil, certain food packaging, takeaway trays, contaminated plastics, etc. You dump that into your black bin which is collected every two weeks. 

Municipal bin collectors like Greyhound or Citi Bin empty the black bins, bring them to a separate facility, and then other trucks ferry the waste to Poolbeg, where it is dumped into the pile.

The waste is taken from the bunker and transported to the combustion chambers, where it is heated at over 850C. This reduces the waste to ash. It also heats up water, which is converted to steam to power a turbine creating electricity for the national grid.

In total, the facility is allowed to process up to 690,000 tonnes of residual solid waste a year. This generates about 61.5 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 115,000 homes.

This is a small fraction of Ireland’s total electricity demand, with the central function of waste-to-energy facilities being to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.

In September, a planning notice was issued for the Dublin District Heating Project, which would use the heat burned at the DWtE to heat 50,000 homes in the Docklands area. The plan has been in the works for decades, but faced a series of delays.

Walking around the large imposing facility, the nondescript offices and cold, sleek design do a good job at making you forget what the primary function of it is – to burn the vast, vast quantities of rubbish we produce. 

Facilities like this are not without their opponents, with environmental groups saying that the burning of waste increases harmful CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, and that more focus should be put on reducing waste, rather than burning it.

Staring through the glass at the vast quantities of rubbish being added to the ever-growing pile, it makes me feel that vast disconnect we as a society have with our waste.

Whether you flush it, drain it, or put it in the bin, it all ends up somewhere.