Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)
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I remember it. It applied to lemonade bottles and so on. Those same products were then sold in plastic. Clearly, the technology developed such that it was possible or cheaper to produce them in plastic and then have the plastic bottle thrown away and just make another in a single-use way. It was an example of technology moving forward to allow us to create a very wasteful system. The Deputy’s question is whether we can bring back refillable glass bottles. That is the case in Germany and the Netherlands for beer bottles, for example, where there is a standard-sized bottle. That bottle is heavier than a regular single-use glass bottle because it has to be able to endure being picked up and knocked about a bit. One of the issues with that is the weight of these containers being shuffled around, so there is energy use in terms of moving them, refilling them and reusing them, which is a challenge. There is also a challenge from the manufacturers, who may want to use their own branding in the shape of their bottles, if we make a common bottle that everybody has to use.

It is definitely worth looking at. If it works in another country, is it something we should try to emulate? It is definitely something we will be looking at in our circularity gap report, which will come out this summer.