Former city dumps will not be opened for mining

Any proposal to open up the former dumps at South Park and the Riverside for the recovery of valuable materials would be a non-runner – however, Carrowbrowne would be a location that could warrant further investigation if national policy changed.

That’s the view of the Galway City Council in response to a suggestion by Environment Minister Denis Naughten at a waste industry seminar that landfill mining applications were likely.

The number of landfill sites still receiving waste is down from 25 in 2010 to just six nationally, one of them the recently reopened site in Kilconnell in East Galway.

The former Greenstar-operated dump, which closed when the company went into receivership, was reopened by Galway County Council for a period of two years until the end of 2018. It will be taking in 100,000 tons of waste each year from some of the major waste companies in the county and will then close. The Council will then implement an aftercare service over the following 30 years.

When unearthing the unsorted domestic and commercial waste in a landfill, mining could uncover a treasure trove of aluminium, plastic and scrap metal while also reclaiming scarce urban land for development, Minister Naughten said.

“As a result of our throwaway culture, it would not surprise me, as Minister for Natural Resources and Exploration, that we could soon see applications by mining companies to reopen landfills to recover valuable natural resources that we just threw away in the past,” he stated.

The Environment Protection Agency, which is the licencing authority for current and former landfills, said it had closely examined a detailed study in 2013 on the potential of landfill mining in Scotland.

“From an environmental perspective, the potential environmental impact of any such proposal would have to be assessed in detail and, if the activity was approved, all regulatory and environmental protection requirements put in place, before such an operation would commence,” the agency told the Irish Examiner.

The EPA has been following developments in Belgium, where there is a plan to mine the Remo Milieubeheer NV landfill, which received 16 million tonnes of municipal solid waste and commercial and industrial waste from the 1970s onwards.

The project aims to recover materials for recycling and to capture and generate 75 MW to 100mw of electricity from the residual waste by with gasification technology.

There has been no landfill operating in the city for the past 15 years. The last was one was in Carrowbrowne on the Headford Road, which has been filled in with organic material and covered over with soil and grass. A site adjacent to it has been used as a composting facility, first by Galway City Council and then Barna Waste.

South Park has not been used as a dump for over 50 years while the landfill between the Tuam Road and Bothar na dTreabh – where the Riverside is now a popular residential area – is but a distant memory, according to a spokesman for Galway City Council.

“There would not be any, any suggestion of going back into South Park and reclaiming metal,” he told the Galway City Tribune.

“The landfill at the Riverside has been built over so that’s a non-runner. We are intrigued by the suggestion by Minister Naughten about landfill mining. There would have to be an enormous amount of research and safeguards put into it. Carrowbrowne is constantly being monitored under licence from the EPA and levels taken by our staff to ensure it is safe.”

Decommissioned dumps are expensive to both monitor and maintain because of the health risks posed by gas emissions and water pollution.

In 2012 the Scottish Government, via Zero Waste Scotland, commissioned Ricardo-AEA to undertake a scoping study on the feasibility and viability of landfill mining and reclamation in Scotland.

Just 60 documented projects have been undertaken worldwide since the first recorded project in Israel in the 1950s.

A cloud has hung over South Park on the edge of Galway Bay since 2006 when it was closed by the City Council after the chance discovery of highly toxic poisons contaminating the soil due to a historic dump. Galway City Council re-opened the park in May 2012 and took away the danger signs warning of hazardous materials following the all clear from the Health Service Executive (HSE) without any remediation works being completed.