When Gerry Crehan retired recently from managing the Silliot Hill recycling and waste distribution facility, he ended a 13-year period during which he oversaw major changes in how waste is dealt with in Co Kildare.
That was just a small part of his 38 years of service with Kildare County Council. He worked initially with the Waterworks Department in Newbridge, then joined the newly set-up Environment Department in the Council.
“The Water Pollution Act had just come into force, so our early work required us to licence all firms in the county who were discharging anything into the sewerage system. Later it expanded to air quality, noise problems and that kind of thing.”
It was all about trying to bring industry in the region into the 20th century in environmental terms. “The bigger companies took to it easily, some of the older ones found it a bit strange. Farming practices, for instance, gave us particular pollution issues.”
At the time, the County Engineer was John Carrick, whom Gerry remembers as a ‘very far-seeing’ man who believed in education as the best way of regulation. “Between ourselves, Teagasc and the Department of Agriculture we got a lot of good work done on the farming front, using the carrot rather than the stick.”
When he was asked to come and work at the Silliot Hill facility, it was to stand in for a week until a replacement was appointed for a person who had left.
“It turned out to be a very long week,” he says with a grin. “We were building the lined cell in what was known as ‘Joe’s Pit’, as the existing landfill area was filling up rapidly. We were also applying for an EPA licence.”
The facility at Silliot Hill was a former sand pit, converted into a ‘dilute and disperse’ landfill. As part of the original setting up, a baseline survey had been undertaken of all ground water wells in the area. Over the years it had been among Gerry Crehan’s duties to monitor that system. So he was quite familiar with the facility.
The ‘week’ stretched into two, and then three and eventually Gerry’s name on the licence as acting manager made it rather a permanent job. One which wasn’t always easy. Indeed, he had a ‘baptism of fire’ in his first year.
“When we were moving to the new lined cell, the old landfill was capped. But instead of coming straight up through the vents, the landfill gases went out sideways and under some homes on the Carnalway Road.”
Gerry discovered this and immediately informed his then boss, County Engineer Jimmy Lynch, and County Manager Niall Bradley. “The Manager straight away got the people concerned put up in a hotel. It was just before Christmas, so it wasn’t nice that they had to spend Christmas away from their homes. But there was no option. And I remember myself, in the wind and the rain of that particular Christmas morning, I was going around checking sampling points in and around the facility.”
A new system was designed to extract the gases, and part of this was ‘flaring’ them through a pair of vents. “The blue flames were very visible at night and occasionally people would call wondering if it was spaceships landing or something.”
The use of the new lined cell system was a big improvement on the old ‘dilute and disperse’ method. But any landfill is just that, and will always bring its own problems of smells, litter and more.
“What I tried to do was to keep in contact with all the neighbours to the site and work to minimise any difficulties for them. Invariably I found them all to be very nice people. I also tried to run an ‘open house’. If anyone wanted to come in and see what we were doing, I wasn’t going to hide anything. If I could do something I would, and if I couldn’t, I told them.”
Eventually, even the new pit was full and the landfill closed. It was part of the licence that the current recycling and distribution facility would replace it.
“We worked out a system that would be as simple as possible for people to use. And I’m happy now that I’m leaving that it is a good place to come. It is clean underfoot, it is user friendly, and I think the staff here get on well with the customers. And by and large the customers tell us they’re happy with it.”
From a one-time ‘dump’ which had one man working there, the operation has become something of a mini-industry, with a current workforce of up to 17 people. Over the years, some initiatives worked, others didn’t.
“We had a composting pilot plant at one stage. It wasn’t of scale enough to make a profit, though, and it fell by the wayside. Then we had another operation for composting sludge, which did produce excellent compost, but the turkey litter which was being used as amending material made the air quite ‘fowl’ and I eventually had to tell the guys running it that we were closed.”
The recycling idea began when Gerry was watching loads of cardboard being dumped by shops and other commercial companies. It was also rapidly filling increasingly scarce landfill space. “I suggested to these people that I would halve their charges if they left it in for recycling.”
He did a deal with Smurfits to take the material, which was later extended to newspaper and other paper waste.
“I looked at other things then, the bottles, the clothing banks, the plastics. I was trying to find markets for them.”
Eventually most of the plastic was being converted into corrugated land drainage pipes by Galway plastics entrepreneur John Concannon. “Now we can show visiting schoolchildren pictures of our raw plastic bottles, and drainage pipes used in the local motorways which were made from them.”
Gerry may have just retired, but he won’t be inactive. He is studying to be a barrister, and whatever spare time he has left over he will continue to indulge in his passion for horse-racing.
Meantime he looks back, mostly with fondness, on a ‘week’ that was 13 years long.
Brian Byrne.
(This article was originally published in the Kilcullen Page of the Kildare Nationalist.)
