Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 19 April 2023
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Recycling Farm Plastics: Discussion
Tim Lombard (Fine Gael)
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My next question is for the Department. The group collects plastic. One could argue the point that the less it collects over the 70%, then the more it costs. You could argue that is not happening. I am baffled that the Department is not fully engaged in a PR service around this. The more successful this is, and there are environmental impacts and everything else, the better and it benefits everybody. For very small money the Department could do something really significant here. Potentially, anything around 4,000 tonnes of plastic goes missing every year, which is a significant volume of plastic. There is potential that we could gather up that plastic by having a really good, solid campaign spearheaded by either the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine or the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications. I ask the Department, which will look at the tyre issue next week, to come back and look at this issue as a real win-win for the environment, farmers and the service.