Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Is the slogan not "reduce, reuse, recycle"?

It kind of puts them all as being equally part of the solution. Is that not part of the problem? Recycling is ultimately not the solution; the solution is reduction and reuse. I do not know if the Minister of State saw the recent report from Britain on microplastics being released by the process of recycling. Recycling, while better than incineration or landfill, is a bit of an illusion by the petrochemical industry, which is making money from plastics. It seeks to pretend that we can keep using single-use plastics and that it can be done in some environmentally sustainable way, when, fundamentally, it is not sustainable to have the recycling of single-use plastics.