Cork County Council suspended the acceptance of timber and wood at its civic amenity sites some months ago because a contraction in the waste timber market nationwide has led to difficulties in securing outlets to accept the waste. The council has said it will resume accepting waste timber as soon as it becomes feasible to do so.

"Basically there's no place for this timber to go, nobody is accepting this waste timber at this point and our sites are full at the moment," council official Ger Barry told this week's meeting of the council's Western Division.

Speaking at the meeting, Cllr Danny Collins asked: "Is there any advice we can give people? This is going on now for a number of months and builders are scratching their heads. They're finishing a house here and finishing a building there and their pile of timber is getting bigger. A construction worker said to me the only advice he was told was to store it. He said there's only so much stuff he can store. If he burns it he'll have another crowd down on top of him."

Cllr Gillian Coughlan said the timber issue "reflects badly on us as a local authority".

"We are a big county, I think we should as a county be able to solve this or have some sort of interim measure to store the timber ourselves. It shouldn't have come to the point where we're not accepting timber at recycling centres. We should have some sort of innovative solution where we could collaborate with a charity or something to move on this timber and to use it again."

"We're becoming a more urbanised society, people do not have places to store these types of waste. We have encouraged them to use their recycling centres. People have the highest of respect for those centres but if we continue to narrow the gauge of the amount of items that are taken there that respect will lessen and we will see more and more illegal dumping so there are far-reaching consequences for this," she said.

Cllr John Michael Foley was in agreement with his colleagues. "There's a lot of builders in an awkward position at the moment whereby they don't have the yard to store it. I would concur that maybe we need to look at some facilities to store it for some builders because they're either leaving it on site which is not good for the person getting the works done and they need to get rid of it somewhere. I fear that there would be fly tipping as a result of this. Fly-tipping is bad enough as it is and I fear that it could start a trend," he said.

Council official Ger Barry told the councillors that the local authority will look into the possibility of other options for the timber waste but pointed out that "the civic amenity sites are mainly for domestic users rather than for commercial activities."