Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. It is great to have him in. I have been trying to get him in for a couple of years and so it is great that we finally got a meeting with him on the agenda. He has done a lot and is leading the way. We have never had a Minister of State with responsibility for the circular economy before us, so it is super that we finally have one now.

Deputy O'Reilly mentioned the hospital stuff. I also want to raise the issue of wheelchairs. Plastic aprons are one thing, but wheelchairs, commodes, Zimmer frames, lifts for stairs and all that stuff are treated as single use. It is absolutely insane. There are mountains of it. I broke my leg last year and I still have a wheelchair, three pairs of crutches, a commode and two Zimmer frames - and I just broke my leg. It is madness. I have friends who work in the sector, including Cystic Fibrosis Ireland and other charities involved with people who have physical disabilities. They have said that if anybody gets cured or passes away, the stuff just piles up. If we think about all the energy it takes to extract the ore, make all those metals and then process them, it seems mad that these items cannot be reused. Of course, I know they need to be clean but we are able to clean things. It is not as if we need to invent a system to sanitise things again. I would love to hear if we can do anything with the HSE on that. It might save it some money given its current overspend.

Last week, representatives from Enterprise Ireland and the local employment offices, LEOs, appeared before the committee. I felt very disappointed with the lack of urgency or any sense of taking anything to do with the circular economy seriously when it comes to upskilling small businesses. I had come from the Business in the Community Ireland event which Deputy Bruton mentioned, and that was inspiring. It seems that the big private sector companies which have the time and the money to pay people to do it right are doing really well. We have a model there; it can be done. However, I do not see the LEOs upskilling the businesses or helping them in the way they need to help them reduce their waste. Even though I believe funding is available for reducing energy and stuff, I would like to see what they are doing about the circular economy. It was not even mentioned last week when they came in. Maybe they need more supports and more experts in that field to get them to do it.

Since so much plastic is recyclable, is there anything we can do? I think the Minister of State is going to do great things. For example, Killarney has a brilliant new initiative where all coffee shops have signed up to the use of reusable cups, which is fantastic. The only thing is that all those cups are made from virgin plastic. I would love to see that any new initiatives that come about as a result of the circular economy are encouraged only to use recycled plastic as opposed to virgin plastic because we know all virgin plastic comes from oil. That seems like an awful waste since we have so much plastic recycling.

What is the status of our recycling of plastic in Ireland? I looked into it a few years ago and we were exporting all our plastic to Scotland to be washed and turned into pellets, and we were then reimporting it to turn it back into products. It would be great if we could do more of our own plastic recycling here. People are becoming sceptical because they believe it is all going to China and there is no point in recycling anyway. We need to help people to have a bit more faith in recycling being part of the solution.

There is a brilliant QQI level 6 white goods field service engineer course running in Meath. It is the first of its kind in Ireland. I would love to see the ETBs getting support to roll that out across the country. It is essentially training repair people. I know a guy who fixes hoovers and a guy who fixes washing machines. I would love to see them in some way lauded as the heroes of the circular economy. Are supports available for them to take on apprenticeships? They have the skills; I do not care what certificates they have. I do not want it to be an issue where they do not have qualifications so we cannot recognise the 30 years of skills they have in fixing things. I would love to see that being valued.

A bugbear of mine is the big festivals. I have done tent collections for Calais and other places. This might not be a huge part of the waste. However, we are normalising single use and waste being totally acceptable in society if we think it is okay for these big festivals to come in and all the 20 somethings and 30 somethings are told they can get away with leaving all their stuff behind because that is what is still happening. I am thinking of Electric Picnic to name but one festival. I know the owner of that site banned vaping which is great. He also banned cash and many other things. I have met the man. He is getting away with charging a lot of money to vendors and punters, and he is getting away with dumping tonnes of waste into landfills in Laois every year. Given the climate emergency and the need to encourage a circular economy, we need to look at what we can do to stop the normalisation of people walking away and leaving all their stuff behind.