Bray, Ireland – The earthen cliffs near this seaside harbor town have been sporting colorful decorations recently: Erosion by the gentle waves of the Irish Sea has exposed the scraggly remnants of hundreds of blue, black and yellow trash bags. The shredding plastic flutters in the wind alongside jutting scraps of rusted metal; the twisted wrecks of unidentifiable junked machines already lie on the rocky beach below.
Some 200,000 tons of rubbish were buried over generations at this municipal landfill, half an hour south of Dublin, until it was closed in the early 1980s. Now that the dump is falling into the sea, the mess on the beach has become the symbolic tip of another iceberg: this island nation’s historic inability to deal with its garbage.
Bray, some say, is the forefather of a waste-management situation that has spiraled out of control. Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” economy has generated a vast increase in garbage over the past decade.
That unpleasantly tangible side effect met with Ireland’s inadequate capacity, expensive landfill fees and lax oversight to create a roaring black market in garbage collection. Construction companies and even homeowners paid unscrupulous truckers to cart away rubble and trash.
Carting industry executives say as much as 1 million tons of waste, or 15 percent of the national total, still disappear illegally each year, and the money changing hands over it may reach up to $120 million.
“It was like ‘The Sopranos,”‘ said Liz McManus, a Labor Party member of Parliament who lives in Bray. “It was hugely lucrative, very large-scale, and some people were simply bought off.”
The government is struggling to find alternatives. It has managed to get zoning and environmental approval for a huge incinerator near Cork and hopes to build six more in what one newspaper called a “necklace of incineration” across Ireland.
But every month the devastation of another scenic spot comes to light, littered with broken refrigerators and shattered televisions.
Illegal dumps are unearthed so often that they barely warrant a headline.
Some illegal landfills, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of tons of material, have been found in abandoned quarries; several have been found to contain untreated hazardous material such as hospital waste that could contaminate watersheds and conservation areas including spawning grounds for wild salmon.