Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

Everybody wants to recycle, but they are currently not being given enough opportunity to do so, despite Government pronouncements. The recent Forfás waste management benchmarking report and the European Environment Agency's report, entitled The European environment — State and Outlook 2005, highlighted Ireland's growing waste generation levels. The Forfás report showed that individuals in Ireland produce more waste on average per annum than any of the other nine countries studied. The EEA report placed Ireland 24th out of 25 countries on the same measure.

The Minister of State will argue that increased waste generation figures result from increased economic growth, but does that mean we must wait until the economy slows down before we tackle our waste crisis? Economic growth and a building boom may have made our task more difficult, but that cannot be an acceptable excuse for doing nothing. The plastic bag levy is one of the few examples of the Government adopting measures to dampen waste generation. It is only today that the Minister grudgingly announced that he might consider adding 4 cent to the levy. I am not sure if that will change consumer behaviour. He should have made the legislation open enough in the first place to double the levy, because that would concentrate people's minds.

Many Dubliners have been appalled by the level of litter and waste generated by the introduction of freesheet newspapers. They would be even more appalled if they realised the Government had been in discussion with the newspaper industry for over five years regarding the establishment of a producer responsibility scheme for the industry. To date, those negotiations have produced no results. The policy of the Green Party is to encourage industry to reduce the volume of packaging waste it generates. We need a carrot and a stick approach. We need to provide tax relief to businesses and industries that carry out research and development into redesigning products to extend their life cycle. We need to require manufacturers to make greater use of refillable, returnable containers for their products.

However, this Government sees higher environmental standards as a threat to our economic competitiveness, despite much evidence to the contrary. An English report entitled The Contribution of Good Environmental Regulations to Competitiveness stated that waste minimisation could yield British manufacturers €4.5 billion per annum. In other words, profits can be made by improving environmental quality. However, this Government is not going down that road. The Minister of State's embarrassment on where we stand in the European recycling leagues has led to him announcing recycling volumes in terms of how many times material could fill sports stadia. Second last is still second last, no matter how many times Croke Park can be filled.

The Government established a market development group to identify new applications and markets for recyclable materials, but two years after its establishment, the group has made no report or recommendations. We need a statutory agency charged with promoting research and development on recyclable materials, providing guidance to companies that wish to switch to more environmentally friendly products and providing grants to companies seeking to establish recycling facilities.

In a recent reply to a Dáil question, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government said the costs of introducing deposit and refund infrastructure in Ireland would be prohibitively expensive and that Ireland had gone too far down an alternative route to consider deposit and refund schemes. When I asked him on 9 May whether the Department had carried out any financial and environmental comparisons between these schemes, I was informed that no formal study on the matter had been carried out in Ireland. The Minister is making poor decisions on critically important national issues. This is bad enough, but to make those decisions without carrying out formal studies is completely unacceptable.

The EPA's waste survey for 2004 showed that three quarters of Ireland's recyclable waste stream is exported. I wonder how stringent are the checks which ensure that all the material is recycled. A project on verification of waste destinations revealed irregularities with 30% of these waste shipments. Only one in five of the checks on Irish exports were actually carried out, so we cannot be smug when saying our waste is going to be recycled.

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