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

If the Minister of State is providing some information, perhaps he could give me an update on the dump in Belcamp in due course.

On the circularity section, I do not think I need to tell the Minister of State the context and impact indicators being offered here are wholly inappropriate to meet the circular economy challenge I know he has set for himself.

From his own Department or with the help of the committee we need to identify what target indicators we will track. I have a few ideas. In the context of the Act that was passed, the Government has undertaken a commitment to set sectoral targets in areas like reuse, material usage and so on. What departmental work is ongoing within the different sectors, be it food, construction or retail? There are huge opportunities and the Government has undertaken to develop circular economy strategies in each of the key sectors. However, it will be down to the Minister of State's Department to kick-start that process by either setting targets or indicating that we will move towards European targets. As he probably knows, we are way out of line on this front. However, we will not see the progress changed. For example, in the construction sector, unless designers, architects and those who commission buildings have an understanding that they will have to change, they tend to go for the line of least resistance and they do not adopt better materials or look at flexible design. They do not look at how waste is recovered at the site. We still have a lot of sites that have no proper waste segregation on site. Waste that could be reused is just dumped into a mixed situation where it can never be recovered. The Minister of State needs to start setting frameworks in each sector. I am interested to see how the Department is setting about doing that.

My second question relates to the Minister of State's other responsibilities. When the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, was before the joint committee last week, he told us that as yet there is no baseline for green procurement. I know the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, produces some data on green procurement. However, we ought to be seeing the EPA's indicator on green procurement being reported in these Revised Estimates so we can see that the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform and other key Departments are changing and the Office of Government Procurement is not waiting until someone comes knocking on its door looking for a green procurement framework. It should be proactively pushing that and setting ambitious targets. I am interested whether we can start seeing a baseline for green procurement that can be tracked across Departments. Can we see which Departments are adopting and applying it? Is it happening in our housing and hospital procurement and so on?