Ms Mindy O'Brien:

In terms of convenience, I agree with the Deputy. We are preaching to the converted. Many people will say they do not want plastic packaging. I ran into a friend recently. She had just purchased oranges that were packaged in a plastic bag. When I asked her why she had not bought loose oranges she told me that the packaged ones cost 25 cents less and then she ran away from me. She knew she should have purchased the unpackaged oranges, but it was more convenient to just grab the packaged ones. It is very convenient to just grab a bag of onions or apples. We need to make reuse and refill convenient. I have given this a great deal of thought. In zero waste shops one can bring one's own container and refill it, but have to weigh the container and then refill it. It is a process. We need products to be pre-filled in reusable containers. When one buys the product you pay for the container initially, but one can then bring it back to shop and have it replaced with a new container. The shop will then have the used container washed and put back into use. It will not be on the consumer to wash it; that will be done by the company. When people are going for a coffee they often forget to bring their cups and so they opt for disposables. We need cups that can be rented. One buys it and return it. We need agreement on a standardised cup. Instead of putting a cup into a rubbish bin, one would return it to, say, Starbucks or Insomnia, where it would be washed and returned to the pooling system. We need to make it easy. Likewise for takeaways. I was in Howth on the bank holiday in June, where I saw a lot of compostable packaging and paper bags being disposed of in normal rubbish bins. The containers I am holding up are reusable polypropylene containers. They can be used hundreds of times. They are really good in-wash and they are easily stacked. In one of the towns in San Francisco, instead of having rubbish bins on the street they have used container bins. People throw the used containers into the bin and they are then picked up and sent to the industrial washing facility and returned to the cafés to be used again.

The Deputy is right that we need to make reusable more convenient so that is almost the same experience. People are so tired of all the packaging.