Why's it so hard to find a bottle bank in the city centre?

Stephen Bourke, who lives around the Docklands, used to drop his glass recycling down to the bottle banks on East Road, he says.

Life was good, Bourke says. “Those bottle banks were there for donkey's years. And then at the start of this year they disappeared."

The line he heard was that the council removed them because of illegal dumping at the textile and clothes bins, which were placed next to the bottle banks.

But a spokesperson for Dublin City Council said that's not quite what happened.

Yes, councillors and residents had asked for years for them to be stripped out for that reason – but the council had resisted, the spokesperson said.

"The banks were subsequently removed to facilitate private development works, as the facility was located within the red line boundary of the approved planning permission for the development," they said.

Whatever the reason the council took it out, with it gone, Bourke had to look at other options to recycle his bottles.

Dublin City Council now has just one glass recycling facility, or bottle bank, in the whole of Dublin 1.

That's the North Strand Recycling Centre, tucked away on Shamrock Terrace. It's open between 10am and 4pm Monday to Friday, and 10am to 1pm on Saturdays.

Far from ideal for many people scattered around Dublin 1, working different hours, says Bourke.

So, where once he could walk, now Bourke's best option is to drive to Alfie Byrne Road in Dublin 3, he says.

“It’s the other side of East Wall for me, whereas I used to just walk down the street with a bag,” he says.

There's no plan though, to add any new bottle banks in the area, according to a draft Litter Management Plan 2026-2028 presented to councillors last November by Barry Woods, the council's head of waste management.

The council is “committed to recycling and to providing the best possible recycling infrastructure in a busy, urban environment”, a spokesperson said recently.

But national planning legislation means it can't install glass bottle banks within 50 metres of residential properties, they said.

“We are further restricted by access needs for service providers. Banks cannot be installed where there are overhanging trees or overhead wires," they said.

“They cannot be installed where there is conflict with bus lanes or cycle lanes, and they must be directly accessible by HGV,” they said.

Both sides of the city centre are unfortunately lacking in glass recycling facilities, said the spokesperson. There are simply no suitable locations to put them, they said.

What are the rules?

If a rule saying there can't be a bottle bank within 50 metres of a house is one of the major constraints on installing more of them in the north inner city, could that be changed?

Green Party Councillor Janet Horner, who represents the north inner-city and has worked on this issue, says that that rule is not in a law, but from a regulation.

She pointed to a response she got from council management in June 2020 to a question asking about providing more bottle banks to the Central Area.

That response referred to the Planning and Development Regulations 2001 ("SI 6o0 of 2001"). These say that a "bring facility" will not be considered "exempted development" unless it meets certain conditions.

Among those conditions? “No such receptacle shall be situated within 50 metres of any house, save with the consent in writing of the owner or occupier thereof.”

If something isn't considered exempted development, then a full planning application is required to try to do it, and that application might or might not be successful.

Bottle banks have been installed in the city, so it is possible.

The council's website lists dozens across the city. On the list are bottle banks outside the Spar on the Stiles Road in Clontarf.

These receptacles back directly onto the garden wall of a house. It's well within 50 metres of it – and plenty of other dwellings.

Also, Horner, the Green Party councillor, said that statutory instruments can be changed, and she'd like to see that happen. “I think it is a problem,” she says.

“One of the things that I had put in at the end of last term was about micro recycling centres across the city, but the whole waste [management] unit, we can't seem to get even the most basic things out of them at the moment,” she says.

Horner points to Copenhagen as a good example of a city making glass recycling much easier for its residents. The Copenhagen municipality has about 670,000 people.

Residents in the Danish capital without a bin for recycling glass at home can use one of 550 public glass bins dotted about the city.

The population of the Dublin City Council area is about 590,000. It lists 77 glass recycling options on the city streets – with one in the north inner-city.

Targets met?

A spokesperson for the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment said on Tuesday that it has no role in the siting of bottle banks. That's down to councils, they said.

But national glass recycling targets are being met, they said.

The national glass recycling rate for 2023, the latest year for which official statistics are available, was 83 percent, said the spokesperson.

Well above the EU target of 60 percent for that year – and also above the 70 percent target for 2025, and the 75 percent target for 2030, according to the EPA.

About 73 percent of this comes from households, and 27 percent from commercial sources, they said.

Still, says Bourke, the glass recycling rate could be better.

There is low-hanging fruit being missed in his apartment block anyway, he says. A good chunk of the general waste bins in the basement are taken up with glass, he says.

Asked previously about what happens to glass thrown in general waste bins, an EPA spokesperson said that, "We know that the amount of glass in the residual (black) bin is less than 3% of total waste."

But also that, "They are not likely to be removed from the residual waste stream and are likely to go to incineration."

To avoid binning his bottles, Bourke ends up stockpiling glass, along with the Re-turn scheme plastics, in his one-bedroom apartment because he only gets to the bottle bank maybe once a month.

“It’s another job that I’ve got to take time out of the day for and generate traffic for, which is a little bit frustrating,” he says.

Whatever about national glass recycling targets, says Bourke, it’s also about convenience for the average citizen.

“What's the council doing for me? Nothing apparently but making my life more difficult for wanting to recycle,” he says. “You put me in the newspaper saying, ‘I want my bins back!’”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.