Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Will the Minister of State outline the policy tools that will be included in executing the circular economy strategy? My fear is that many of the tools we might want to deploy will not be ones for which the EPA has the legislative powers. If we were considering banning a product, we would have to do something else, or if we were developing a strategy for construction, I do not think we could reasonably expect the EPA to have the bandwidth to be doing that. It would be useful if the Minister of State could provide a note for the committee on how the Government plans to execute the strategy when it has developed it. It seems there will be a lot more to it than the EPA running a programme. As I said earlier, this comes very much from a waste-centric view, whereby the circular economy would be just a patch onto the waste process, but it goes much more fundamentally back up the supply chain into design issues and I do not think the EPA has the expertise or the legal authority to address some of the issues the Government might want to tackle in a circular economy strategy.