Mr. Séamus Clancy:

On the salvation issue, we carry out waste characterisation studies twice a year at all the major plants in Ireland, and we separate household from commercial waste. What we find is that the contamination level in the cities and urban areas is far greater than in the rural areas. That is predominately down to the collection process, but there are also many more apartments and there is less consciousness of the issue.

The cost associated with recycling means that there is a greater need for facilities to separate it. Where there is significant contamination, the whole load collected can be lost. If, for example, someone puts a container of oil into his or her recycling bin, it contaminates the whole truck and that is lost. That is a continuous education issue that we are working with. The industry is examining ways to track down and highlight this to consumers who are contaminating their recycling bins and we are very much in favour of that.

On the cost issue to which Mr. Hogg referred, we have started in the past three years to do detailed costings on the collection and recycling costs across all the different sectors and facilities. There are nine main recycling facilities in the country. We have a breakdown of those costs and we are breaking it down to material type in particular as well to better inform us. The greater the cost of recycling a particular material, the greater the subsidy level. Our subsidies are fixed until the end of 2018. From then on we will seek to recalibrate those in line with targets from the European circle economy package.

China has not closed its doors, it has said that it is reducing the contamination factor to 0.3% for plastic and 0.5% for paper. It is virtually impossible to get to that level. The European norm for each of these is 2%. The majority of the material leaving Ireland is within that 2% to 5% overall. That is why the recycling facilities here are working hard to improve the technology they are using to create greater segregation. Everyone in this room needs to realise there are still many people hand-picking recyclable material going through all these facilities.