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

The deposit return scheme is there to address a problem, namely, not enough of our bottles and cans are being recycled and are ending up in the environment. If the Deputy has ever taken part in a Tidy Towns group and walked along the roads, he will have seen that approximately half of the litter items the group picks up are bottles or cans. Some Tidy Towns groups are quite analytical in what they do. A group in Wexford counted all of the litter items and found that 50% were bottles and cans. They get embedded in the grass verges along the roads after people throw them out of cars and so on.

By adding a value to them, it becomes much harder to walk past a bottle or a can on the ground because they are money. I went to the supermarket and did my own first large-scale recycling after keeping a couple of bags in the kitchen. Along the way, I picked up three cans. That was on a short walk. The whole mindset around this type of waste, which relates to single-use drinks containers, is going to change and is changing.

Deputy O'Sullivan asked about the issues we are facing and how do we make things better. We are in the transition period. The first four months are difficult because this is the time the shops are selling off old stock and bringing in new stock. Some of the items people have at home are not accepted by the machines because they did not pay a deposit on them, while others are. That can be confusing. It is also a period when people are learning new habits. I do not just mean the habit of bringing bottles and cans back to the supermarket, which is the same habit as keeping plastic bags for supermarket shopping and keeping them in a drawer or having a place in the kitchen for them. There are also new habits for retailers. The latter have to learn that: when the hopper is full, they have to empty it; when there is no paper for receipts, they have to change the paper; and when somebody manages to put in bottle that has liquid in it, they have to clean out the machine. I have spoken to shopkeepers and supermarkets about this. They have told me they must allocate a certain number of hours for their staff to carry out this work.

The volume is increasing significantly all the time. Yesterday, 2 million items were brought back. That was on a weekday. Go back a couple of weeks and it was 1 million items. Go back another few weeks and it was 500,000. The frequency with which retailers must maintain the machines and empty them is increasing. At the same time, the amount of money they get for handling these items is also doubling. This is because they get 2.2 cent for taking in one container.