Drummee will contain a state-of-the art landfill site as well as a civic amenity site to serve the Enniskillen area.

    The site is being developed under the regulations imposed by the 1999 Landfill Directive. In fact, when the Council applied for planning permission for the facility in 1995, it was already designed to the standard later stipulated by the coming legislation. Planning permission was granted in Autumn 2003.

     “It will have a full leachate management system in place as well as a landfill gas management system. It will also be subject to on-going monitoring for all of those activities both inside and outside the site,” commented Mr. Robert Gibson, Director of Environmental Services for Fermanagh District Council.

    “The proposal is that the landfill void is engineered and has all five layers of protection for leachate and gas management in place when it is finished,” Mr. Gibson added. Planning permission for the landfill site is for 15 years. A new entrance from Rossorry road is to be created with full site lines and security fencing.

    “We are moving away from the Glassmullagh form of waste disposal and we are moving into this century. Glassmullagh represents last century’s technology. It was opened in 1967,” said Mr. Gibson. It’s believed that in the early days, waste was drawn by horse to the facility from neighbouring villages.

    Drummee is the best environmental and economic option for the county, Mr. Gibson pointed out. “If we had negotiated for waste to be taken by another Council we would have had no control of that waste and we would have had no guarantee how long they would have taken our waste for. All options were considered before Drummee was chosen. It is part of a controlled strategy dealing with waste now until 2020,” he explained.

    The Drummee waste management site is part of a wider waste management strategy for the entire county. Already the majority of households have a second ‘blue bin’ which is used for dry recyclable materials. Recent improvements have been made to the civic amenity centres in Lisnaskea and Irvinestown.

    The Council will also be seeking to improve the recycling of waste in the county. Currently 18.5 per cent of waste is recycled. It is seeking to reach the target that 25 per cent of waste will be recycled by the end of 2005 and 40 per cent by the end of 2010. “The difficulty is that the amount of waste is rising each year by 2.9 per cent and the percentage of waste we have to recycle is increasing but the landfill figure almost remains the same as those two nearly rule each other out. Unfortunately there are some materials at this time which we can’t recycle and we have to put into end disposal,” he said.