Before 2012, Ireland held a position in Europe that should have been a point of pride. We were the last country with a capital that technically still had fully municipalised public waste management. Things had already started to change, of course. The Waste Management Act of 1996 saw local authorities begin charging for rubbish collection and private operators entered the “market”. Dublin City Council quit the waste collection game in 2012.
One thing that rarely seems to happen anywhere local authorities privatise waste collection is a more coherent system. Local grievances about waste collection persist around the country – including where I live in the city, where the council wants to ban rubbish bags (which are bought in corner shops and collected) and replace them with plastic bins (which people can’t fit in their homes, because so many people live in terraced housing, many without back gardens).
Meanwhile, a few communal compactors have popped up in Dublin city, the subject of photoshoots with the Lord Mayor. Communal bins are good, but we need them everywhere across our cities, villages, towns and suburbs. Most importantly, we need them underground.
There’s no point in doing things half-right. While large street compactors help somewhat, underground bins are a much better solution. When bins are underground, the space around them is retained and street clutter is kept to a minimum.
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Underground bins are not some sort of revelatory invention. They have been used in Liverpool for four years. They are used in that city for terraced homes where people don’t have space for a wheelie bin, just as is the case for so many households in Ireland. Emptying and reinstalling them takes 10 minutes.
There are also underground bins in Antwerp, with a tenth of the population using the system.
In Porto, where underground containers were installed in the historic centre, 7,000 residents use the system.
In Rotterdam, there are 7,000 underground waste containers, meaning there is one underground bin for every 100 households. This system was implemented in the 1990s.
In Florence’s Unesco city centre zone, there are about 400 underground containers. The result? A 36 per cent saving compared with the cost of door-to-door rubbish collections.
Underground bins are not a universal solution for all kinds of housing and businesses, but they work well in areas of high residential density as long as they are in convenient locations. They offer flexibility because a household can decide when it wants to put the bins out. Their efficacy in this context was concluded in a 2025 study on underground container systems in six European cities published by ACR+, the Association of Cities for Recycling.
Moving refuse awaiting collection to convenient locations underground means thousands of large plastic bins don’t clutter paths and streets, and wildlife has fewer plastic bags to rip open. I don’t rage at seagulls for this. They’re just wondering where all the herring has gone.
Here are some simple principles. Waste collection methods need to be appropriate for the context: in places where residential and commercial density is high, communal underground bins are a solution.
Waste collection also needs to be spatially sensitive and not result in footpaths crowded by wheelie bins.
[ Bin bag ban hits Dublin’s north inner city as area seeks to dump ‘dirty’ imageOpens in new window ]
It needs to be seen as a public amenity. That doesn’t mean you don’t pay for it, but privatisation has caused huge issues, raising costs for households and businesses, while private contractors profit.
It needs to alleviate illegal dumping, not add to it. If costs are high and disposal is inconvenient, dumping will inevitably increase. Some people will always dump their rubbish illegally – and believe me, this sends me into a rage – but mitigation has to be about acknowledging realities and behaviours, and making it easier not to dump. CCTV doesn’t address this, but more facilities and frequent street-cleaning do.
Waste collection should not be ugly – not the bins themselves, and not the noise and pollution of the collection vehicles.
The service needs to be fair. That means it should be the most convenient for the elderly and those with mobility issues.
Ultimately, waste collection as a system should be about minimising waste. You don’t just do this by waving the stick of cost; you have to include the carrot of community composting facilities, decreasing single-use plastic and addressing excessive packaging more generally. The number of public bins in villages, towns and cities should also be increased, and there should be a coherence to their design that is sensitive to the heritage and aesthetics of their locations, instead of the existing hodgepodge of public bin design and size.
And finally, make waste an opportunity for public good when it reaches its final destination. The Poolbeg incinerator in Dublin has been up and running for a long time now, but its district heating system still hasn’t materialised, even though that was part of the planning. Construction on linking the piping that has been installed to get the district heating system running is set to begin next year, a decade after the incinerator became operational. District heating systems should also be public systems.
But there is a basic overarching principle here too: municipal services should be provided by and for the municipality. Otherwise, you end up with fragmented services and results, bins not fit for purpose and rubbish on our streets.
