A NEW REQUIREMENT for all households to have a brown bin which comes into effect in January will ‘not be an overnight change’, a group representing waste companies has said.

New legislation coming into effect on 1 January entitles all households to a brown bin collection service for food and garden waste, subject to their provider’s lift charges.

Currently 68% of households has access to a brown bin service, and it is now being extended to around 400,000 – mostly rural – homes, with off-shore islands are excluded.

Households also must be provided with a garden waste collection at least once a month from March to October.

An EPA report found that as much as 21% of household waste placed in black or green bins was actually organic waste, which could be separated into a brown bin.

Speaking this morning to RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, the secretary of the Irish Waste Management Association – a trade association with members such as Oxigen, Panda, and and Greyhound – said it will not be an overnight change, as the legislation was only finalised in the past week.

“The waste company will contact [the household], so you don’t have to pick up the phone and ring right now,” Conor Walsh said. 

Brown bins will be rolled out to all households on a phased basis, adding that households have a “legal obligation” to segregate waste correctly.

Walsh said there “are a lot of reasons why we need to segregate food waste”:

People may not know that we make compost out of it. We make biogas out of it. The biogas replaces a fossil fuel gas. Compost replaces peat. So environmentally, it’s very, very important that we segregate the food waste.

Households who decline to use a brown bin will be “required to notify their collector in writing, together with details of how they will manage their food waste”.