Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State and Ms Higgins for attending. The Minister of State has a very important job as regards reuse and recycling. The biggest environmental challenge we see at present is that of microplastics in the oceans. Even at European level, we do not seem to be making any great strides in trying to address the amount of plastic we are producing.

I will return to an issue raised by the Minister of State. When he spoke about reuse and recycling, he mentioned he visited a company in County Waterford that was manufacturing PPE, and that he was looking at its proposals for how it could take used face masks and recycle them for other medical purposes. I advise the Minister of State that that company has now nearly wound down. It was an indigenous manufacturer that was set up during the Covid pandemic and had almost 30 employees. I gave a lot of time and support to try to get it going. It was doing state-of-the-art work that was fully certified. The problem was we could get no support from HSE procurement to buy this company's products, which were equally priced, simply because we have a dysfunctional procurement process in this country. There are people writing tenders for procurement who have not got a single eye on the importance of trying to create a platform where indigenous companies can compete.

This is something the Minister of State needs to seriously look at. It needs to run right through our local authority procurement as well. The Minister of State should get the procurement list for local authorities, which I did many years ago, and look at the amount of money that goes out of a region in local authority procurements. The simple fact of breaking up tenders would negate the reason for having to put them out to tender in the first instance. However, the people involved will not do it because of the paperwork. These involve significant purchasing. The Minister of State spoke about the power of government purchasing and procurement. The amount of money that is going out of regions and out of the country because of procurement guidelines is ridiculous. State aid and European directives aside, there are ways to format procurement orders in trying to at least to redress the balance there. I ask the Minister of State to engage with the Department of Health to understand why. As other Deputies alluded to, the LEOs and Enterprise Ireland were before the committee last week talking about the need to try to stimulate investment in our local economy. I have given an example of a company that has invested multiple millions but could not get State support to keep it going.

I welcome the national food waste prevention roadmap, but the Department will have to look at the buying practices of the multiples. They are forcing small food manufacturers to give them product on a sale or return basis and nearly force those food manufacturers to merchandise that product on the shelf. Whatever comes back that the multiplies do not use, or goes out of date, is just handed back to the suppliers. That ends up going into municipal waste, as the Minister of State knows.

Municipal waste levies are a great idea but the problem is they are leading to the issue of fly-tipping and dumping in the countryside. There is no point putting a levy on local authorities unless better money is provided for enforcement around fly-tipping and the monitoring of that.

I absolutely welcome the ban on disposable vapes but they are not just an environmental threat. Vaping is a health threat. I hope that at some stage in the future we will talk about banning vaping. Anybody who thinks that ingesting molecular-sized oil into their lungs is a good idea is not paying attention to what is happening in healthcare. All of the signs are now telling us that vaping might become an even greater health hazard than smoking.

I will raise two other issues. The first relates to the green public procurement strategy. I again ask the Minister of State to be careful of the law of unintended consequences, when trying to create green procurement rules, regarding what the Government will actually force businesses to do and may unintentionally bring on in respect of production practices or putting companies out of business, as I said.

The Minister of State talked about the establishment of a centre of excellence for circular manufacturing and innovation. I ask him to look at South East Technological University, SETU, Waterford, where we have two of the leading scientific gateways, the pharmaceutical and molecular biotechnology research centre, PMBRC, and the south eastern applied materials research centre, SEAM, which are world-class as regards innovation and the amount of grant aid they are winning at European level for programmes. That would be a good place to start looking for where that centre of excellence might be place.