Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Let me pick up on that. One of the discussions has been on community engagement. With respect to the community-led approach and the kinds of initiatives we have been hearing about, such as social enterprise and community-led initiatives, I agree there is almost a co-benefit, as has just been described. It is seen as a positive and as something connected to a community. That is slightly different from solely having centralised commercial actors involved in recycling, reuse and recovery.

Maybe there is a scope, and we referred to a few examples of it from the Rediscovery centre. In a way, the mandate is to innovate. Maybe CRNI might have examples of this, but there have been examples at community level of innovation. This is effectively a new way of approaching things. When we look at things like reuse, that innovation can come from a social or community-based project. Even though it has, unfortunately, no longer continued, the project in Tanzania that was outlined earlier was a good example of this. That capacity to see new potential and new forms of reuse is different to a large-scale contracted body, in respect of straightforward repair and reuse as a regional function, for example. I would appreciate some feedback around what the particular co-benefits are around the social enterprise or community-based approach.

Of course, there is no reason that cannot be at scale. The insurance issue was outlined. If you look to a group scheme, at supporting scale and at that initial funding to almost create a new sector of the economy going into a community and a social enterprise-led space, at scale something could be done around things like the pooling of those particular skewing costs, like insurance. I would appreciate the witnesses' thoughts on that.

I want to go to the other side of it and the discussions around perverse incentives, that is, perverse incentives towards recycling, for example, rather than reuse or recovery. The Rediscovery centre highlighted that there was a concern that some of the incentives could look to this. Even when we look to the question of textiles, for example, on the one hand we are focusing on how we create receiving opportunities for textiles in terms of the existing collection centres and charity stores. That is a minimal piece. On the other side, do we need to have a stronger pressure on manufacturers regarding not creating this waste? Do we need to have measures that cannot be easily satisfied because you dump a load of textiles on somebody subcontracted to take them away and that there would be a cost to the waste of textiles?

Our colleague on the committee, Senator Boylan, produced some interesting legislation that explicitly looked at the wider set of non-food product and consumer durables. It sought to ban the destruction or dumping of non-food products and placed a significant pressure and obligation on not just the manufacturers, but the companies. For example, there is a phenomenon whereby some major retailers, including major online retailers, dump a lot of new products. This is not even product that has had a short lifetime. It is product that has never been used and has not sold and is then dumped or destroyed. We must ensure we do not see those types of products simply pushed one step further into recycling, but rather reused or donated as these are unused products.

Both CRNI and the Rediscovery Centre mentioned-----