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

I move amendment No. 3:

In page 7, between lines 20 and 21, to insert the following:

“(a) the supply chain and processes of production and distribution of products and services are redesigned in order to minimise the environmental damage,”.

This is a fairly important point. The way the Minister is defining "circular economy" is quite limited. It is about materials being kept in use, the maximum value being extracted from them and their recovery at the end of their useful life. It omits both the choice of the right materials in the first place and the importance of design in ensuring all these principles are observed. The failure to look right back to the design point in the supply chain is going to mean we fall short. I contend one of the weaknesses in the way this Bill was conceived is it is very much taking a limited view of the materials and their ending up in waste, whereas I believe the biggest delivery for the circular economy will be in rethinking design. For example, I have mentioned already the case of motor cars where if you can redesign the thinking to sell travel as a service instead of cars as a product to be kept idle in a driveway, then you can dramatically change the material use and the whole conception of how the supply chain should work and its capacity to minimise environmental damage. It is therefore important we create the signal that we expect producers to go back to first principles and look afresh at the way they designed their sector and the materials it uses, as well as the more limited objective of keeping materials in use for as long as possible, maximising their extraction of value and recovering them. It is a slightly wider definition but when the Minister comes to look at individual sectors and devise strategies for individual sectors he will appreciate the value of forcing the issue of design into the thinking as the first principle that should be addressed in any sectoral approach. That is the thinking behind my amendment.

Deputy Bríd Smith has tabled another amendment but it is weaker than mine because mine forces producers to think about the correct selection of materials. Often, if the wrong material is being used, if it is one that damages biodiversity or has other environmental downsides to it, then simply looking at the entire supply chain will not be enough. If you look at the entire supply chain from design onwards and at potential environmental damage at any point in that, you will get a broader concept. I suggest it is less divisive looking at even the climate challenge in this context where we know there is an awful lot of division in Ireland, especially in rural areas, about climate being an imposition. If you look at redesigning whole sectors for a bright and fulfilling future, you get a much better political approach, as well as being more correct in the theoretical approach as well. I leave it at that.