It's non-toxic, doesn't smell, doesn't attract rats and has become such as pervasive part of our streetscape that, for years, we have scarcely noticed it. But construction and demolition (C&D) waste is not without its environmental toll, and, as the building boom took off in recent years, the sheer scale of C&D waste being generated caused pressure on a number of fronts. In Dublin city, ever-present skips outside C&D sites became constant traffic obstacles. But unlike cars, the council couldn't slap a parking ticket on them, so it went back to its rulebook and had skips added to the definition of a vehicle. More seriously, it now appears that some of the illegal C&D waste dumps that sprouted up around Wicklow were being used to hide far more hazardous caches of clinical waste. But, perhaps most staggering of all was the unexpected discovery, made when the Dublin Regional Waste Management Plan was being developed, that C&D waste accounted for over half of all the waste being handled by local authorities and private operators in the city.
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