Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses for the presentations. I am not happy with the progress we are making. Four years ago we were talking about halving food waste and now we are still talking about measuring it and getting a baseline. That is not good enough. We passed legislation that said within six months we would have a strategy from the Department. We are still waiting for a strategy. That Bill was initiated in 2021 and passed in 2022; here we are in 2024 and we still do not have a strategy.

I presume the Department did not trigger the start of that section to avoid some breach of the legislation. My frustration is that there are a lot of what might be called low-hanging fruit and good practice in other countries that we could easily be implementing on a voluntary basis already. In France, there are zero packaging areas. There are producer responsibility schemes that are well-established but we have not applied one in the food waste area. We still have non-recyclable plastics in use in the food sector. We are still talking about the same things.

The EPA will confirm whether I am right or wrong but my understanding is that half of the material that householders collect goes into the wrong bin. It indicated that 17% of the contents of black bins could have gone into the organic bin. In the commercial sector, the figure is far worse. The figure given by the EPA was that 27% of commercial black bin waste was comprised of compostable material. What I have been consistently calling for, and I do not understand why we are not doing it, is a voluntary compact bringing together the various interests in the food sector. The construction and food sectors are the two sectors with real potential for rapid progress in Ireland. I do not think the best way is to wait for regulatory requirements to come beating down upon us. They are already only six years away. If we start bringing in regulatory heavy-handedness at five minutes to midnight, we are going to get one awful mess. My sense is we need to get voluntary compacts in place that can roll into the Department's permanent strategy. An awful lot of time is being lost by virtue of not getting to grips with relatively easy things.

As regards having a compost bin at every house, the rate is only 69%, having stood at 55%. While we are making some progress, my sense is that it is not fast enough to meet a target that is fast coming down the track. Can we not put our foot on the accelerator? The big strength of the circular economy is that it is a less divisive approach than telling people that they must cut emissions. Some 45% of our emissions come from materials other than fossil fuels. We are doing an awful lot on the fossil fuel front but we are not doing anything comparable on the other 45%.

I know that was a bit of a rant rather than a question but there is a serious question behind it. Why the delay? Why not take a series of actions well ahead of a statutory strategy?