Pod of the latest Last Word on the Environment, with Matt Cooper on Today FM, as broadcast on Thursday July 31st is below. We discussed the workings and finances of the hugely popular deposit return scheme for cans and plastic bottles, plus the impact of light pollution on the natural world, and what steps can be taken to reduce the harms. Finally, we discussed the continued boom in air travel, with record numbers of people heading through Irish airports over the Bank Holiday weekend. Climate crisis, what crisis?
Transcript below:
Matt Cooper: John Gibbons, I know you’re fan of the deposit return scheme to get people’s plastic bottles and cans and things back for recycling. ?But what’s this about 67 million euro or so of the money that people paid when they bought their cans or bottles not being reclaimed?
John Gibbons: Good evening, Matt. Let’s take it from the top. ?This scheme has been a huge success. Since its launch, we’ve got about 1.6 billion bottles and cans returned. They reckon that’s about three quarters of all the bottles and cans that are put out there are being returned. ?Now, some people just simply shove them into the machines. They get their voucher and they don’t cash it in, or they’re just using it as a way of getting rid of them, which is fine. That’s their entitlement. ?Some of these machines are also connected to charities, Matt, so that it’s a good way of making a small donation to a charity. But what we’re seeing is that the company that operates this return, they have €103.2 million in unredeemed deposits on hand by the end of 2024, which is enormous. Now, I was doing some back back of the envelope calculations here. ?And my estimate, when you consider that the return rate is between 15 and 25 cents, depending on the size of the container, I give it a median of about 20 cents. That means for every billion bottles and cans returned, that’s about €200 million in levees? So what we’re seeing here is that the company, which is a not-for-profit organisation operating with the approval of the Irish government, essentially it’s piling up cash because a lot of these cans are coming back and people are not making the claims. ?And of course, what’s important to emphasise here is that if you buy a can or a bottle from a supermarket, you will pay your levy. Now, if you throw that in the regular bin and it’s never returned, that 25 cent levy goes to Re-Turn anyway. And to my mind, it’s a slightly perverse incentive, and I’ll tell you why I say that. you know, in a way way, Re-Turn are getting paid for you not returning, which is a strange one. ?So, if the return rate, for example, falls, in a way, it doesn’t really matter to them. Because they’re collecting the money anyway. So I’m not sure whether this was necessarily fully thought through. ?Maybe somebody can correct me on this, but I would prefer to see a return scheme where they had a strong incentive for success, but whereas in this, the money pours in whether or not the returns are coming in. So that’s something to consider.
Matt Cooper: But I presume this company doesn’t get to hang on to the money. ?You must return it to the state for environmental use.
John Gibbons: Well, this, I guess, whether the funds are ring-fenced for that, that’s another day’s story. I think what’s important, probably to stress here, Matt, that this is a good news story. ?I don’t want to nitpick it unduly, and I certainly don’t want to put people off using it because I use it, many other people use it. It’s a great idea. ?You see the machines everywhere, this is the way to go. And probably like with all of these things, you have a certain amount of, shall we say, administrative hiccups to be gotten through. But the key thing here, this is getting bottles and cans that would otherwise be waste back into circulation.
Matt Cooper: ?Another listener says, I’m saving all my return receipts from my Christmas shop.
John Gibbons: There you go. That’s, you know, that could accumulate quite a lot over the char hours of the year, okay?
Matt Cooper: ?Another person says, I wonder how many people just continue to throw them into the green or black bin?
John Gibbons: If they do, Matt, they’re throwing the money away. So if you want to do that, nobody can stop you, but you’re throwing your own money away.
Matt Cooper: Okay. My biggest shock says listen, I wasn’t in the volume of plastic bottles were in return to the amount of money not collected, but the sheer volume of plastic bottles, we bring return and that we use.
John Gibbons: That’s right. ?If you think about it, we’re a tiny country, five million people, and here we are dumping a billion bottles and cans. And remember, all of these are essentially designed to be single use. Now, we’re trying to extract multiple use out of them. ?For example, aluminium can be recycled indefinitely. But these plastic, so called PET plastic, the maximum number of times you can recycle this plastic is about five to seven times. After that, it has to be landfilled or incinerated. ?So what we need to be doing here is reducing the amount of this stuff in circulation. Now, it is better not to be throwing it out, yes, but I think your listener as has hit on something there. The big underlying issue here is we’re absolutely overusing these resources.
Matt Cooper: Robert says, the only people who recycle it are the people who recycled anyway, the amount of people I see throwing away the so-all returnables didn’t ever and never will recycle. Tell us about this new study into night-time light pollution.
John Gibbons: That’s right, Matt. First of all, what do we mean by light pollution, I think a lot of listeners would be surprised even to hear the term light pollution, like what’s wrong with a bit of light. I suppose the key thing to understand is that for aeons of evolution, nature operated through daytime and nighttime. So, for example, we have many nocturnal creatures, insects, birds, etc., who they only come out at night. ?And they depend on the signals, for example, moonlight. And you have birds, migrating birds, for example, that hunt and navigate by starlight. Now, all of that is fine, except when the current atmosphere or environment, especially around urban areas, is so heavily polluted with light pollution, that these animals are losing their signals, their abilities to detect, for example, the difference between night and day. ?Why this matters matter is that their signals, for example, on reproduction, on breeding, on nesting, on even their timing of hunting and so on. Those signals are essentially messed up when you flood the night time with light. The hunters are unable to hunt and the prey are unable to conceal themselves. ?So what we’re doing, I suppose, essentially, is we’re sort of turning night into today with the extensive use of lighting. This study comes out of University College, Galway. And one of the interesting things about to emerge from it is that they found that probably contrary to people’s expectation, that street lighting wasn’t actually the main source of light pollution. ?It was, in fact, the light coming out of our own windows, which is kind of surprising, you know, and the suggestion, I guess, is that we should, first of all, at night, if you have curtains, pulled them.
Matt Cooper: So you say, if you have curtains, everyone used to have curtains; they’re not as common as they used to be.
John Gibbons: That’s right. ?And there’s another kind of a little paradox built in here as well. And that is the fact that in the last decade, we’ve had the welcome introduction of LED lighting, which, of course, has been a huge boon from the point of view of carbon emissions and so on. But the flip side of LED lighting is that it’s so cheap that it’s everywhere. ?People are flooding their gardens, they’re stringing them around their trees. Across the road from me, somebody has got four of their bushes and trees permanently illuminated at night. This this is right now. Not just Christmas. This is in July, Matt. ?And you see this. Also, you have people who fill their gardens with these little solar panel night lights that are everywhere. And these might look cute and dainty, but they’re disrupting animals going about their business. ?So it’s one of these things, again, where it’s only when we stop and really have a think about the impacts that we’re having in the natural world. And again, once people are aware of it, generally speaking, most of us want to do the right thing. And I think the key thing here is to try to reduce the spill of light pollution. ?Give you a small example. If you have one of those floodlights in your back garden or your yard, turn it off, or put it on a not too sensitive motion detector. Do not have that blasting away all night. ?It’s not good for your neighbours and it’s not good for nature. The other thing, Matt, about this as well, of course, we we’re part of nature. So the human endocrine system is also disrupted by light at night. ?So you find, for example, our Circadian rhythms, our ability to go into deep sleep; light is another form of pollution, and we need to rest deeply at night, and light pollution can interfere with that, just as effectively as noise.
Matt Cooper: Okay, I noticed today on LinkedIn Kenny Jacobs, the head of the Dublin Airport Authority, put up a post saying that it would be the busiest week ever for Dublin Airport, with over half a million passengers this bank holiday weekend. He said, we’re making some progress through our planning applications this week. ?We applied to extend the end of Pier 100, mostly for Ryanair. He also said that Cork airport welcomes over 90,000 passengers this weekend. He said his own family would be four of them. ?He described as Ireland’s fastest growing airport. So basically, our airports are getting busier and busier and busier and the reason there is because more and more people are flying.
John Gibbons: Yeah, he’s entirely correct. ?And we were talking about Re-Turn earlier as a state or quasi-state agency. DAA is certainly a semi-state agency. And the last time I checked, it is national policy, it is the state’s policy to reduce carbon emissions from all sectors. So here we have the chief executive of DAA bragging about reversing that and increasing carbon emissions.
Matt Cooper: No, no, in fairness now, he made no mention of increasing carbon emissions. ?He’s arguing he’s providing facilities for people to travel because they want to travel. And he’d also say that an enormous amount ofwork has been done at the airports to make them more carbon friendly. carbon emissions friendly.
John Gibbons: Yeah, they were actually pulled up by the advertising regulator over this recently, Matt, as you know, where they put out an ad. ?I think Marty Whelan was voicing this particular ad talking about all the amazing carbon reductions they were doing at Dublin Airport but the little bit they omitted to mention is they were only talking about emissions from the airport itself, which apparently would constitute a fraction of 1% of the emissions associated with the aircraft that fly in and out of Dublin airport. So we get a huge amount of sophistry here. I know this is another favourite subject of ours. ?Dublin Airport is pushing for about a 20% increase in the number of flights or passenger movements through the airport, and they themselves, in their own planning application, say that that will increase emissions by 22% Matt. So Kenny Jacobs knows exactly what he’s doing.
Matt Cooper: But isn’t the point, John, is despite all the conversations we have and despite the contribution of aviation to carbon emissions, more and more people want to fly.
John Gibbons: I completely understand that. And I don’t blame people, by the way, for wanting to fly, because flying is one of those areas of life that we have absolutely failed to regulate. We’ve taken an incredibly valuable resource and we’ve cheapened it. ?And what we do is, with cheap aviation, we outsourced the real costs of that, the climate damage, the ecological wreckage. That’s outsourced to other people in other parts of the world. But of course, as we know, it isn’t long before that climate bill comes home to roost here in Ireland.
