Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. I will ask my officials to get back to him with a note on the dump in Belcamp in a similar way to other dumps. He made a general point about circular economy indicators. Similar to the previous question about key indicators, it would probably be worth having a review of them. I am open to any suggestions on that.

The Deputy also asked about the sectoral targets. Following the Circular Economy and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2022, he asked how sectoral targets and so on will be formulated. The work on the new circular economy strategy is well under way and it is expected to be published this year. That will include sectoral targets. He mentioned key areas like construction and food. The area with most room for improvement is construction. That is the area we need to tackle, even though it is not as tangible or relatable as areas like food and clothing. To give an example, I can see from visiting construction sites that a lot of clay and aggregates are often removed from the site and taken away to be put in landfill. More clay and aggregates are brought into the site from quarries. Particularly in cases where the knowledge is not there, it can be difficult to reuse clay and aggregates on the same site. Even when the knowledge is present, there can be a regulatory impediment to moving clay and aggregates from one site to a neighbouring site that might need it. I think that is more the norm in other countries that are doing better on their circularity statistics. I would like to see less quarrying in future and less clay and aggregates going into landfill. We are looking at a range of regulatory options to dissuade people from quarrying and using landfill for clay and aggregates.

On the question of eco-design, the Deputy is right that design is critical to having a circular economy. It is very difficult to retrofit afterwards. When you are retrofitting things, it means they were not designed correctly in the first place. When I speak to designers, they tell me they might be given 100 criteria for design of a mobile phone or something, but if the criteria are not there for it to be repaired or reused, that is not one of things they build into the design. The question is to get it into the design. There is already an eco-design directive from the EU, with a second one coming out soon. There is also an organisation called CIRCULÉIRE, which is a public private partnership created by this Department in co-operation with Irish Manufacturing Research, the EPA and EIT Climate-KIC. It aims to test, finance and scale circular manufacturing solutions to deliver significant reductions in both CO2 emissions and waste across its members. CIRCULÉIRE is an opportunity to develop state-of-the-art circular manufacturing techniques in Ireland. The Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications is committed to the future development of the project. The Environment Fund will be renamed the circular economy fund in line with the Circular Economy and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2022. The purpose of that Act is to facilitate the move to a circular economy and I can see that design is one of the elements to be promoted. I suppose we will have to change how we teach people in our third level institutions.

Deputy Bruton also asked about green procurement. The EPA publishes an output report on green procurement and the most recent version published is for 2020. There were very low levels of green public procurement in that report. Getting public procurement to go green is important from two points of view. It is a very large portion of expenditure in the economy, and it also has the effect of leading by example. I am worried that if we are not careful and do not update our procurement frameworks, the private sector will be doing its procurement in a greener way than the public sector. With that in mind the programme for Government included a commitment that we would update all of our frameworks for green procurement within three years. The deadline for that is the middle of this year, which is the end of June 2023. The last time I checked, we were in the high 80s for the percentage of procurement frameworks converted to green procurement.

The Deputy also asked how we can keep track of who is using these frameworks. I am responsible for procurement in the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, and I have been looking at the data we are collecting from frameworks. We have more usage data in some of our frameworks than others. We are able to see how often a framework is used and how often it is deployed. However, it is important to make sure that we are not running a green framework and a brown framework, the traditional classic framework, in parallel. We find that people just keep using the one they know, which is the one they understand. They do not switch over to one unless we retire the other. That is an important part of it. We will be publishing more detailed data on procurement. It will not just be the EPA reviewing us. We need to be ahead of that in seeing the extent to which we are using them. For example, there is an electric vehicle framework. This year, as part of the climate action plan, public sector bodies are not meant to buy non-electric vehicles unless it is impossible to do otherwise. I have usage data on how often electric vehicles are being bought and how often diesel and petrol vehicles are being bought. I can see that shifting dramatically over the past few months. I do not have data for the last quarter. It is absolutely critical.

One thing the Deputy has mentioned is procurement in hospitals. Our hospital procurement is the largest purchasing agent in the country.

Hospitals are not traditionally areas where a lot of green procurement would be found. They tend to burn all their waste for reasons of infection control, which is understandable, but that does not mean a hospital could not make an attempt at sustainability. We are looking at what best practice is in other countries because some medical institutions have done well and progressed well. I have been to visit factories in Waterford that are converting personal protective equipment, PPE, into other plastic products, for example. You might think all PPE would have to be burned but once it is brought to a certain temperature, it can be recycled. There are options for sustainability and green procurement and I am working with John Swords, the chief procurement officer of the HSE, to ensure we get better value for money and green procurement in our hospital sector.