I always wanted to write headlines for tabloids. The burning issues are rubbish and gorse - they’re both going up in smoke. Lets start with the rubbish….
An ESRI survey commissioned for the EPA showed that 42% of households burn rubbish, and that this increased when the pay-by-weight refuse charges came in. That’s five out of twelve families! People surveyed willingly admitted to doing this, so obviously they don’t know that it is illegal, and downright dangerous. I regularly see galvanised bins with a chimney lid for sale in Bantry.
Burning rubbish emits dioxin which causes cancer - not just to people inhaling the fumes, but to people drinking milk from cattle that graze the land on which the smoke descends. I put out a press release on this which thankfully got coverage in the Examiner and Southern Star this week, but it will take a lot more to raise awareness, and then it needs strict enforcement if it is to stop.
We have dog inspectors for heavens sake…
It is fruitless to fight against waste incinerators around the country if we are going to just burn the rubbish in our fireplaces in West Cork.
Now gorse has joined the fray, and as usual it has already caused a lot of damage and given a few home owners miraculous near-misses. And as I look out my window, I can see plumes of smoke from at least two fires. Last night there was one complete hill lit up. No doubt some forestry will get hammered as happens each year.
The daft thing is that burning gorse is ineffective. Its a pyrophytic (fire-loving) plant. It is exceptionally high in volatile oils so burns like crazy. There is a hard skin around the seed which becomes scarified (ready to germinate) at temperatures around 100 to 150 degrees. So after a fire, the first plant to germinate and push its stem out of the charred soil is… Yep, gorse. It has evolved to cope with bush-fires, so burning isn’t the cleverest way to get rid of it.
Besides being a huge risk to neighbouring property, burning destroys all invertebrate life in the soil, and this reduces the feedstock for birds and other creatures, so the ecology of the whole area suffers a huge set-back.
Under the Wildlife Acts it is illegal to burn gorse or any other foliage between 1st March and the end of August. Does anyone know of someone who was actually prosecuted for felling trees or burning gorse out of season? But for farmers, there is now a more serious financial risk - if caught they can now lose some of their single payment. If enforced, that should put a stop to it.
In the meantime, don’t you just love the way we sell Irish produce as clean and green? If we want to keep an export market, or develop premium artisan food brands, we’d better either clean up our act, or blindfold tourists and keep ‘em in air conditioned busses.
One of our problems, Quentin, is that we are very good at making laws, and many of them good laws, but utterly hopeless at enforcing them!
April 13th, 2007, at 11:36 pm #Enforcement in relation to burning rubbish and gorse are both difficult. First, few people like to report their neighbours, and how else would rubbish burning get reported. In relation to gorse, the police do investigate, but it is hard to prove that the land was set on fire by its owner, if they point blank deny it.
I’m afraid both are going to depend on education more than enforcement. For example in rural areas, 57% of farmers burn rubbish. Imagine if 57% of the population were burglers. That would be an interesting challenge for the police! Or perhaps nearer the mark, imagine if 57% of food manufacturers were stirring carcinogenic additives into their foods. How would the health authorities police that? Now come to think of it, maybe thats a bit too close to the mark for comfort!
April 14th, 2007, at 8:28 am #[...] households. Blarney is an urban area however with a regular waste collection. Quentin Gargan has a blog post on this and gorse burning. Here’s the Irish Examiner article he mentioned. A note from Cork [...]
June 14th, 2008, at 9:36 pm #Wonderful pages! Keep up the grat work.i
December 2nd, 2008, at 5:34 am #