New company to take over Dublin City clothes banks after last one reached 'maximum capacity'

The Journal

5 days ago

DUBLIN CITY COUNCIL will shortly announce a new company to take over the city's €1 million clothes bank collection service.
It comes four months after clothing collections in the local authority were suspended, when the previous company collecting from the clothes banks saw their storage warehouses reach 'maximum capacity'.
A strategic policy committee meeting heard this afternoon that the tender process for a new operator for textile recycling infrastructure closed two weeks ago, and the tenders submitted are now being assessed.
According to
eTenders
, the contract is worth €1 million and will be valid for two years.
Derek Kelly, the director of service at DCC, told the committee that they received 'a number of applicants' for the new contract, adding that he would circulate the details once the process has finished.
'Hopefully within the next week or two, at most, we'll have the winners decided, and we'll enter the pre-contract negotiations,' he said, adding that he hoped a new operator would be in place in the next six weeks.
The previous operator, Textile Recycling Limited (TRL), temporarily suspended their service on 27 January.
'Extraordinary backlog'
A report on the recycling services that was circulated on 6 March stated that this was due to their storage facilities reaching 'maximum capacity' as a result of 'increasing difficulties in the international used textiles industry'.
Services were also suspended or withdrawn from a number of other local authorities around the country, before they resumed on 13 February.
'Due to ongoing global events, many international textile markets are currently inaccessible, which has resulted in an extraordinary backlog of materials in storage in TRL's warehouses, creating the need for the leasing of additional sites and purchasing of containers,' the report stated.
It stated that DCC Waste Management Services Cleansing teams across the city 'were instructed to focus on the removal of bags and clothing litter from bring bank locations during this temporary suspension of collections'.
Contracts for the collection and processing of this clothing were historically done on a concession basis, where the service provider paid the local authority a set price per tonnes of materials collected each month.
The report stated that due to the difficulties in the international textile industry, 'this model has become increasingly unsustainable in recent years'.
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'It has become apparent that future contracts will require Local Authorities to pay service providers to carry out the service,' it added.
Collection services have since resumed, with DCC enacting 'emergency procurement protocols' to establish a temporary contract during the procurement process.
Fast fashion 'big issue'
Green Party councillor Janet Horner, who was chairing the committee, asked Kelly what oversight it has when it comes to what happens to the clothing after it is collected.
Kelly said that it depends on whether the operator has recycling outlets within the State. If they do not, it is shipped to other jurisdictions. This is monitored by Dublin City Council's National TransFrontier Shipments Office.
'That's where the NTFSO step in to make sure that it isn't just leaving the state and going into a landfill in somebody else's jurisdiction. That can't be allowed to happen,' he said.
Kelly said he would ask the office to pass on information to the committee around the criteria of what is classified as waste and what isn't in the textile market.
'It is a complex area,' he continued.
'The nature of the world at the moment, there's a lot of fast fashion, and the textile quality isn't up to recycling even, and that's a big issue in the international markets at the moment for textiles.'
The Journal
recently reported on how Irish charity shops
are seeing an influx of donations of clothing from fast fashion brand Shein
, many of which have never been worn and still have tags on.
Horner said a certain cohort of the population are very aware of the issues around fast fashion and 'the elements of disposability of a lot of what people are getting rid of'.
She said that the more data the committee had about what happens to the collected clothing would be helpful for consumer education 'as well as for implementing more effective programs higher up the chain to ensure that we are minimising the amount of waste that is getting disposed of'.
The committee also heard that there are 'sporadic issues' of illegal dumping around certain bring banks.
Kelly said DCC have a crew assigned to monitor certain bring banks on a daily basis and collect any illegal dumping. He said the issue is something that the council need to keep under review 'over the next while'.
'I haven't been getting in any way the level of complaints that have previously been sent in by elected members and the general public around the conditions of certain sites,' he said.
'I'm not saying it's gone away, but it's nowhere near where it was.'
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