Buckley, who runs the company with his brother Michael, has just presided over the official opening of the company's new 15m recycling facility in west Dublin.

Greyhound picked an opportune moment to launch the new site, in the wake of the Environmental Protection Agency's annual National Waste Report.

The latest EPA figures show there is just eight years' of landfill capacity available in the Republic and less than three years in the greater Dublin area.

With less than 35% of municipal waste currently being recycled, there should be plenty of opportunities for Greyhound and its rivals to pick up the slack in the coming years.

With EU law demanding adherence to strict targets on waste management and recycling by 2010, Buckley is convinced that there is only one logical conclusion. "People have to change what they're doing, " he said.

The imposition of packaging waste recycling laws has already changed the way businesses handle their waste. Close to 60% of commercial packaging waste was recycled last year, according to commercial recycling scheme operator Repak.

Households lag far behind, recycling just 19% of their waste last year. With the government under pressure to do something about that statistic, operators such as Greyhound stand to benefit if they can get the necessary infrastructure in place.

With its new Clondalkin plant, Greyhound will be able to handle 350,000 tonnes of waste each year. This will be collected and mined for the plastics, paper and other recyclable materials in it, which Buckley refers to as "urban ore".

"We collect it, bring it here, bulk it and sell it back as a commodity, " he said.

Greyhound claims a recovery rate of 87% from the material it collects, with the remaining 13% being diverted to landfill sites.

Of the 125,000 tonnes it processed last year, more than 100,000 tonnes of recovered materials were sold on to paper mills, plastic bottle producers and packaging manufacturers, many of them in India and east Asia.

Accounts filed for the company show that it made profit of just 140,000 in 2004, when the set-up costs for the new facility took a bite out of the bottom line. Greyhound posted pre-tax profit of 1.5m the previous year, however, and has retained profit of just under 4m on its balance sheet.

Turnover figures are not disclosed in the accounts, but Buckley said the company had seen turnover increase by 25% to 30m over the last year, and hopes to grow by the same magnitude this year with the addition of the new capacity in west Dublin.

For corporate customers who use services such as Greyhound's, it's a no brainer.

Depending on the materials collected, recycling plants will pay between 5 and 20 per tonne to their customers:

large corporations and waste contractors.

"The average landfill disposal cost is 135 per tonne. If you can sell [the recovered material] for even 10 per tonne that's 145 difference, " said Steve Cowman, chief executive of Ireland's largest waste management company Greenstar.

The NTR subsidiary had turnover of around 100m last year which, according to Cowman, represents around 10% of the waste management industry in the Republic.

Around 50% of Greenstar's turnover is derived from the three landfill sites it operates in Galway, Meath and Kildare.

At the same time, Greenstar is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the race against waste, recycling around 50% of the 400,000 tonnes it handles each year.

The company has recently opened a 20m recycling plant in north Dublin but, while Greenstar expects to generate a healthy return on that investment in the coming years, Cowman said it's not easy to get ahead in the recycling game.

"You need to have a lot of patience and deep pockets if you're going to build infrastructure, " he said.

Cowman estimates from Greenstar's experience that it can take between five and six years to negotiate the planning process and build a material segregation and recycling plant.

That experience is common in the industry. Conor Walsh, environmental director of Thorntons Recycling, said the company has been trying for a number of years to build a composting plant to process organic waste, but has seen several proposals knocked back.

Thorntons collects waste from local authorities in Dublin, Meath and Kildare, and is keen to increase its capacity . . . not least because it wants to reduce its own composting and landfill costs.

Thorntons made 3m in profit last year on a turnover of 37m, said Walsh. The company plans to reinvest its profits to expand its recycling efforts, if and when planning permission allows.

The company opened a 4.5m plant in Dunboyne, Co Meath, two years ago and has several proposals of a similar size on the drawing board, including a composting plant in the same county.

"We're not slow to spend several million on equipment.

The less we can send to landfill the more we can afford to spend on the technology, " Walsh said.

"The important thing at the end of the day is to reduce what goes to landfill . . . and it makes commercial sense too."