Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We are having this debate because I requested it at the Business Committee a few weeks ago. I thank the other parties on the committee and the Ceann Comhairle for agreeing. My request was prompted by the fact that the Sick of Plastic campaign's day of action is this Saturday and I was keen that the House would debate the matter before that positive initiative, which will involve many environmental groups and young people. I was also prompted by an inspiring visit to Newpark school, which my son attends, a few weeks ago. The transition year students have a campaign, called "Plastic Outta the Park".

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It is a fantastic initiative essentially to eliminate the use of single-use plastics, particularly plastic bottles, and replace them with multi-use receptacles. It is a very positive initiative. Civil society, environmentalists and young people are leading the fight. They are absolutely right to do so. We all need a good kick up the backside to understand how serious this is. I did not really understand how serious it was until I saw a film called "Trashed" a few years ago. I showed it in here. It was a film made by the actor Jeremy Irons, who came to the Dáil to show the film. Very few people actually turned up to watch it. I had not seen it. I was asked by Jeremy Irons to put it on in here because he was showing it in parliaments in a number of places. I was shocked by what I saw in that film.

Anybody who looks into the facts of plastic pollution could be nothing other than terrified. If the threat of climate change is an existential threat to humanity so is plastic pollution. The facts are really scary. We throw enough plastic away every year to circle the entire planet four times. Of the plastic we use, we use 50% just once and throw it away. Only 5% of the plastic that is used globally is recovered. Plastic accounts for 10% of all waste generated. It uses up about 8% of the world's oil production. As has already been mentioned, the connection with the oil industry is very important in this regard. In America, they throw away 35 billion plastic water bottles every year. Annually, 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide, which is more than a million every minute, and 46% of plastics float and can drift for years before eventually concentrating into big ocean gyres. It takes about 1,000 years for plastic to degrade and 97% of all plastics that have ever been made are still in existence, much of them floating in the world's oceans. The great Pacific garbage patch which was featured in the "Trashed" film is absolutely terrifying in its proportions. It is twice the size of Texas. It is just off the coast of the United States and is a massive concentration of plastics. About 40% of the surface of the world's oceans is covered in plastic. One can go on. Annually, 1 million sea birds and 100,000 marine animals are killed from plastic in our oceans. About 44% of sea bird species have plastics inside them or on them. I can go on with the terrifying details. Plastic is choking the oceans and potentially choking the life out of the world we live in. We need to act very soon and very radically if we are going to address this.

It is not just microbead plastics we need banned. We need to ban all non-recyclable plastics. All non-biodegradable packaging should be banned. It cannot be done overnight. We should set an ambitious target for doing it. We should set a date for a couple of years' time and tell producers and retailers the ban is coming in a couple of years and they better get with it. They should get with the programme and stop producing these plastics. They would have to start to move towards it. Things like a deposit and return scheme are good but we need to be much more radical. We used not to have plastic bottles. I remember we used to have glass bottles and one got 5p back on them. Why did we get rid of them? We used to have a thing called the Irish Glass Bottle plant that did all the recycling. Disgracefully, it was closed down. We should have our own recycling industry in this country recycling stuff that cannot biodegrade and stuff that can be recycled but does not damage the environment. We also need to invest seriously in developing alternatives to plastic packaging.

I was in Oxford a few weeks ago. There is a small company there producing film-like plastic that is not plastic; it is made of sugar. One can eat it and it biodegrades. There was stuff on the radio the other day about the enzyme that eats plastic. Coincidentally, I got a call from an old mate of mine who is producing this stuff. It is an enzyme that eats plastic. This stuff can be done but it needs Government investment and support to do it.

If we are serious about this, the whole recycling and waste collection system needs to be taken back into public ownership and standardised. If one just looks at what the private producers are doing, there is no consistency in what one can and cannot recycle. Their policies are being dictated by what is profitable for them rather than by what is good for the environment. We have to take profit out of the equation and for the State to take the lead in getting rid of these plastics that are destroying our planet.

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