Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I echo Deputy Howlin's comments. I thank him and his colleagues in the Labour Party because what they did tonight in giving their time in this way is important. I know there has been much discussion on how we work here. I stand up for this Parliament. I stood up for it in the past and I stand up for it today. We are not a bad democratic assembly. We have a proud constitutional and democratic republic, but we all know that we need to improve the way we work. What the Labour Party did today is a step in the right direction. I am not exclusive in that. When I asked last week whether other parties would be willing to support this type of initiative, in fairness to Deputy Micheál Martin, he said "Yes" straight away. In fairness to Deputies Wallace and Daly and their colleagues in Independents 4 Change, they were the first people to contact me back by email to say that they would support the broad purpose of the Bill, as did our colleagues in Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats and other Independents. I echo what Deputy Howlin said, and I also welcome the fact that the Minister seems to be interested in seeing if this could be made to work. He has done so in the past. We did so in respect of the Bill on fracking. I would like to see us do it again here. There are examples of common cause being found in this House and when we do it gives us real strength.

It will not be easy. There are complexities, technicalities and difficulties, but I want to set out some of the reasons we should and could find common cause. First, it is a basic concept and we are only just beginning to think about and understand it. When the different parties were out on the plinth together today, which was good fun, I mentioned the line about eating chocolate - a moment on the lips and a generation or a lifetime on the hips. With plastic it is a moment on the lips, as one drinks from the coffee cup or the bottle, but it is probably about six generations in the environment. It takes that long to biodegrade. It can be as long as 300 or 400 years. There is a general understanding that has to stop and that we have to switch away from the use of plastics in this disposable, throwaway culture. I was reading different papers today and one was very interesting. It was a European Commission paper on plastic waste strategy and the environment. It states:

Plastic is perceived as a material with no value of its own. This perception favours littering. However, all plastics are high tech and complex materials that consumers should value in order to incentivise re-use and recycling.

That is what we are doing here.

As Deputy Howlin said, there is a climate imperative involved in this issue. Our use of plastics accounts for 6% of global oil use, half in the feedstock for the material and half for the energy needed to make the bottle or container. For every kilogram of plastic, 6 kg of carbon dioxide are put it into the atmosphere. If we could address it, it would be the equivalent of removing all aviation emissions. Aviation is difficult. Climate change does not have easy solutions in areas such as aviation, but there are solutions here. As difficult as they will be and as complex as they are, it behoves us to try in those areas which present the most immediate, tangible ways of improving our environment and reducing pollution.

I know this is somewhat of a step further in that line of thinking but, as a country, 80% of the energy we consume is imported. If one looks at this structure which we have set up and these highly-complex supply chains which include all these oil-based systems, there is a risk to us in that structure. We need to remove this risk to the country which results from being so reliant on oil.

Ultimately there is the big environmental concern involving the fact that the plastic is there for several hundred years breaking down into ever smaller parts which do not biodegrade. There has been an analysis which suggests that with the way we are going - a 5% per annum increase in the use of plastics - we will face a situation as early as 2025 in which for every three parts of fish in the ocean there will be one part of plastic. This will rise to one part plastic for every one part fish if we keep going the way we are going. That will be going into the food system which we will then ingest. This is something we must stop.

There are many other things we need to do in this highly complex area of managing our waste system but we have identified two which we believe we should adopt first. We chose them because, first, people can understand and connect with it. They see a real litter problem in their everyday lives. Coastwatch did a very simple survey, which it does every year, in which it measures what is along the coast. In 2016, it found 8,649 plastic bottles. That is one for every couple of hundred metres of shoreline. We can cut it out. In years past it measured plastic bags and used to find 18 plastic bags for every 500 m of shoreline. Now it is down to finding two, because we took an innovative decision in the Dáil to make it easy for us to clean up our environment and do the right thing.

We have examples. Scotland is looking in real depth at introducing a similar deposit refund system. For those in IBEC and other groups, possibly including the Department, who think that this is terrible and would cost us a fortune, the analysis the Scots carried out says that it does not have to. A circular income stream is created to fund the deposit given back to the householder, but that is not a cost. It is a circular transaction which makes it easier to do the right thing. In Scotland, which is not too different from Ireland, the best international consultants say that when real costs are examined, the money obtained from the feedstock because of higher recycling rates is considered, and the fund built up because of not everyone claiming their deposits is taken into account the system is pretty much revenue neutral. That is what they are saying. They could be wrong and we would also have to look at it ourselves but Scotland is not that different. Holland and other countries are not that different and they introduced this scheme back in 2005. Australian states have recently introduced this. It is not as if we are taking a huge risk and a step into the unknown. There are a number of schemes.

The Department should pay heed to the European Union because its directions on this are absolutely clear. When one reads its mandate on the circular economy and the need to develop this hyper-efficient economy, which is what we want to do, it says that we should be doing this. It is saying that we should not be burning everything. It is clear as day in the directives now coming from the Commission. When the Department comes back and says that it cannot be done and it is not the right strategy or policy, we can cite international precedent and European Union directions. It is increasingly clear that this is the right way to go.

It works. In those states in the United States where a deposit refund scheme is in place, the level of recycling is twice that in other states.

Germany has 95% recycling on plastic bottles, which indicates that it works. In saying we will get rid of the non-compostable coffee cups, France is going in that direction. No one said this would be easy, but the French are moving to eliminate the non-compostable, non-recyclable coffee cups. They will do it in the same timeframe as set out in the Bill, by 2020, so we can piggyback on that. We want to be up there among the posse of those countries that are taking climate change seriously and developing a circular economy. That is where the smart countries are going and that is where our people want to go. I believe we have cross-party agreement on this because all of us know in our everyday lives that we are being drowned in a sea of plastic that was not there previously.

I was slightly caught out when a younger member of our staff said to me: "Isn't it great? We have to get this introduced quickly before that older generation, who remember what it was like to get a deposit back on a bottle, are gone." I am afraid I am in that category. I propose that we pass Second Stage of the Bill today and engage really actively with the Department, bringing in international consultants as needs be in order to complete a major study in advance of the Committee Stage so that we can have a really complex analysis. We should bring in the industry and critically environmental NGOs, such as VOICE, Trócaire and others which have played a stellar role in highlighting the issue and setting out the way. Let us bring them into a working group to bring a really detailed plan to the Oireachtas committee so that on Committee Stage we will have a detailed proposal.

A Cheann Comhairle, in the context of our conversation earlier today, that is the sort of process that can get this Dáil working really well. We will go through the Stages, and change the Bill. We will listen to Sinn Féin, which will probably propose very detailed amendments. I know Deputy Stanley has a very detailed Bill. It would be brilliant to bring that thinking in, bolt it together with other parties' views so that we go to Committee Stage with a really advanced proposal. It is not impossible to have that by Christmas and have the legislation enacted by this time next year, giving it the time and the intelligent analysis, but let us do it. I think everyone is on the same side.

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