Fiona O'Loughlin (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am substituting for Deputy Lahart. I come from County Kildare, which has two landfills that take rubbish from all over the country. To be honest, I sometimes feel I am surrounded by rubbish. We have many wonderful natural amenities in County Kildare, including the Curragh and our waterways and bogs. However, rubbish is being dumped and fly-tipping happens on a regular basis. It leads me to despair.

There is no doubt that littering and fly-tipping are crimes, just as there is no doubt that millions of people in this country care about our countryside and the scourge of rubbish. When the weather becomes nice and sunny, we see rubbish strewn across the seaside and the countryside. We have to accept that this is a symptom of a breakdown in community pride and in wider respect for our country, our natural resources and where we are from. It is bad for our psyche. It leads to substantial direct and indirect costs that run into billions of euro. The amount of money that Kildare County Council has to pay on clean-ups every year is absolutely shocking. I have no doubt that the position is the same in every other local authority area.

Every Member of this House, with one or two notable exceptions, agrees that climate change is one of the most pressing issues we are facing. The manner in which we deal with waste and refuse needs to be fundamentally changed. We need to look at every way of reusing, recycling, reducing and reusing packaging. Every time we take messages home and put them on the kitchen table, it is shocking to see the amount of cardboard, cellophane and non-recyclable plastic, much of which is superfluous. It behoves every one of us to do what we can to make Ireland cleaner and greener.

I commend those who have introduced this Bill, which would certainly help in this regard. It proposes to ban disposable plastic plates, cups, and other forms of tableware. It includes measures with regard to the coffee cup, which is the most notoriously inefficient single-use item. We need to encourage takeaways, coffee shops and supermarkets to offer more compostable packaging and to offer discounts to patrons who bring their own reusable containers, including coffee cups. The conscious cup campaign, which was launched recently, is asking coffee shops to support the transition away from single-use coffee cups by offering discounts to people who bring reusable cups with them. This Bill would also introduce a deposit refund scheme for drink containers. This welcome initiative would motivate people to return glass and plastic bottles and aluminium cans in order to reclaim their deposits, as many of us did when we were children. We need many good incentives of this nature. I commend the Bill.

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