Could a social enterprise turn the city's horse manure into black gold?

Residents and councillors have been complaining to Dublin City Council about horse manure illegally dumped around the city.

Meanwhile, growers across the city and beyond regularly source – either by buying it or taking it off horse-owners' hands for free – manure to dig into their fields, allotments, and gardens to improve the soil.

Illegal dumping of stable bedding in the city, as happened in Cabra recently, is "a classic, like, kind of misallocation of resources", said Peadar Lynch, who works for the Liffey Partnership managing the Cherry Orchard Community Garden, a social enterprise, growing an selling vegetables and fruit in Dublin.

"There's demand in people's gardens, there's supply out there and there's some kind of disconnect happening," Lynch said by phone on Tuesday. "You'd imagine that people would be able to solve this, it shouldn't be that complicated."

Fine Gael Councillor Gayle Ralph recently suggested that the council look at getting involved – maybe just by bringing the right people together in a room – in turning the problem into an opportunity.

For example, properly composted horse manure could potentially benefit community gardens, allotments and Tidy Towns groups, Ralph said.

There are already organisations that collect used stable bedding from horse owners in the city, and turn it in into compost for growers, including Kildare's Equiskips.

But maybe there's room for a social enterprise to step into the space as well, to expand the available options, Lynch said.

The council's approach to the issue

Council managers' public responses to questions about illegal dumping of horse manure in the city have focused on clean-up and enforcement.

The council relatively recently got out of the business of officially accepting horse manure for disposal, and now just cleans it up when it's illegally dumped.

It used to accept used stable bedding for disposal at its depot in Sweeney's Terrace in Dublin 8.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, an average of two people a week paid for the disposal of their manure at the Sweeney's Terrace depot, and "many others" dumped their manure outside the depot or around the city, the council spokesperson said.

The council closed the service in January 2025 for health and safety reasons around access to and from the depot and the storage of the horse manure container within the depot, the spokesperson said.

Illegal dumping of manure around the city is "not a new issue or related solely to the closure of this facility at Sweeney’s Terrace", she said.

"It is the responsibility of the horse owners to dispose of their horse manure legally and responsibly", and "pay the relevant costs", she said.

"The vast majority of illegal dumping takes place for the same reasons," a council spokesperson said by email on Friday. "Convenience in that they put it out when it suits them, an unwillingness to pay the costs ... and a total lack of consideration or appreciation for the environment, the neighbourhood and the residents and businesses who live and work there," said a council spokesperson by email on Friday.

So what private operators would the council direct horse owners to, to legally dispose of their stable bedding?

They can't do that, a spokesperson said. It's "a private business and so we leave it to horse owners/customers to source their own disposal contractor", she said.

Solutions

"Welcome to Equiskips, the home of your horse manure solution," says the Maynooth-based business's website.

Just contact Equiskips, and they'll drop off a skip. The horse owner fills it, and then phones the company to get them to take it away.

The full skip is taken to their composting facility near Maynooth, "where the manure is composted at a high temperature, thus killing all potential pathogens and weed seeds. The resulting high quality compost is then sold for use in gardens or agricultural production systems," the website says.

The cost is "very diesel and time dependent", said Equiskips' John Tuthill by phone last Thursday. So, it depends on how far they have to drive to do the drop-off and pickup, he said.

"We produce an absolutely fantastic product," Tuthill said. "But you can go into a garden centre and buy a bag of compost for €2 or €3 and you can be pretty sure the garden centre is getting half of that, so we're talking a very, very low margin product."

He uses "a certain amount of it for fertilizer myself on my own farm, which I farm organically", he says.

When applying for planning permission for stables around Dublin, some people put him down as their solution for disposing of their used stable bedding, he says. He said he collects from about 75 clients.

"We have a lot of trouble with some of the places in the city centre, where the level of contamination is totally unacceptable," Tuthill said. "We've had to withdraw service. It has to be bedding and bedding only. No nappies, no household waste, no plastic, no metal, you know."

He knows there's some illegal dumping of stable bedding in the city, he said. Some of that, likely, is contaminated stable bedding, he said.

What should a horse owner do in such a situation, if they have a mound that's too contaminated with household waste for a company like Equiskips that takes stable-bedding, and too mixed up with stable bedding for a company that takes household waste?

"We do not accept that there is no legal way to dispose of horse manure," a council spokesperson said. "There is, although we accept that disposal can be expensive and therein lies the root of many of the complaints we receive about horse manure disposal."

Room for service providers?

A few years ago, the council funded the Cherry Orchard Community Garden to trial collecting manure from the Cherry Orchard Equine Centre next door, and turn it into compost, according to a 2019 article from the Echo, reproduced on the Equine Centre's website.

Would the council be interested in supporting more projects like this one, that involve collecting and rotting down used stable bedding, and then selling or passing that on as compost to growers?

The council had been unable to find information about the project and so could not comment on it, a spokesperson said by email on Friday.

But Lynch, of the community garden, remembers the project. He was involved in it.

"At the time we were considering could we sell larger quantities of horse manure as an income stream," said Lynch, who was involved in the trial. It turned out not to suit the community garden, he said.

"At the time, we just didn't have the capital to invest, and probably growing vegetables is more our thing, the vegetables and flowers that we do," he said by phone on Tuesday.

"The horse manure could have worked, but in the end we're very busy with vegetables and other crops we grow," he said.

As part of the project though, they got a report done up by a consultant, with Dublin City Council's help, Lynch said.

"It's kind of a – I don't know whether it was a feasibility study – but it just outlines what you'd have to do," he said. "I'm just thinking it would be a good basis for someone who's thinking of doing a social enterprise."