It’ll first come into effect on certain streets in the south inner-city, and hit the north inner-city next year, said a council official earlier this week.
Dublin City Council is slowly moving towards introducing a ban on the practice of leaving out waste in plastic bags in the inner-city.
A bin-bag ban is set to come in for businesses and residents on 90 streets in the south inner-city in the coming weeks, said Barry Woods, Dublin City Council's head of waste management at the full council meeting on Monday.
The council has been promising this for more than a year and is making slow progress towards that.
Woods also promised at the Monday meeting that a pilot in the north inner-city will also be in place early next year.
That is on foot of the installation of large waste compactors for those areas, with plans to add more on the southside and the first on the northside.
The council have provisionally selected locations for new northside compactors and applied for ESB electrical connections for them, said Woods.
The council is installing waste compactors in an effort to end the practice of those with no space for wheelie bins leaving rubbish out for collection in plastic bags.
The plastic bags often get ripped open by birds, leaving rubbish strewn around.
A council spokesperson on Wednesday said,“We have identified two locations (one in the vicinity of O’Connell St and the other near Capel St) that are suitable for the installation of mobile compactors, and we are finalising details with relevant internal departments at present.”
“Requests for electrical connection to the ESB are being made in advance as this can be a slow process at times,” they said.
On the southside the installation of two long-promised large waste compactors in October – one at St Stephen's Green and another in Temple Bar – was supposed to herald the end of bagged waste on 90 streets.
But at the council meeting on 3 November, Woods, Dublin City Council's head of waste management, told councillors that the council needs to install recycling waste compactors too before it can remove permission for bin-bag collections.
The ones at the moment are for general waste.
Recycling compactors will be “arriving this week, and they’ll be installed hopefully next week” at St Stephen’s Green and in Temple Bar, said Woods at the meeting.
“Once the compactors are in place, we are removing the derogation, removing the permission for businesses to present waste on city streets,” he said. “We are going to enforce that vigorously.”
Waste collection companies are transitioning customers, both businesses and residents, to wheelie bins where possible, he said.
Waste collection companies are offering to collect waste directly from people, too, both businesses and residents, or they can carry the waste to the nearby compactors, he said.
On the northside, the new pilot area to replace bags with compactors will run from Capel Street to Gardiner Street and Parnell Square to the Quays, he said.
The council hopes to install waste compactors on the pilot streets in January 2026, said Woods, at the meeting.
At the meeting councillors asked why the council doesn’t put in big communal bins underground.
Woods said that there isn’t much advantage to the council doing that, because it is not involved directly in waste collection.
Also there isn’t a lot of space below ground in many parts of the inner city, he said.
Woods said that the Department of the Environment is carrying out a feasibility study for a franchise model of waste collection. The council is awaiting the outcomes of that study.
“Focus Ireland would prefer energies went into ending homelessness rather than moving around its victims,” says Mike Allen, director of advocacy.
“We should be able to try these big things and not be afraid of failure,” says Social Democrats Councillor Cian Farrell, who has spearheaded the initiative.
“For nearly a decade, conversations about the possible demolition of people’s homes have gone on in the background,” says Social Democrats Councillor Daniel Ennis.
Rather than repeatedly announcing new plans and initiatives to clean up the streets in the inner-city, “it’d be nice if the current plans worked”, a local says.
