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

I welcome the statement as one of aspiration. However, we are coming late to the party and the statement is somewhat general and lacking in specific detail. We need to move to real projects and investment which will make this a reality. Biological waste is a resource but we are not using it while doing things that militate against it. Building a huge incinerator in Dublin, for example, militates against developing a circular economy and a bioeconomy. Why develop a bio and circular economy - a sustainable economy - when there is a big incinerator where one can just burn everything? That militates against it. Cities such as London, Paris and Munich have all discovered that privatising waste collection and recycling services does not help develop sustainable circular economies and bioeconomies, which is why those three cities have taken waste and recycling back into public ownership. We see from waste companies, the factor that dictates what they will or will not recycle is whether something is profitable, not whether it is good for developing a sustainable, circular economy and a recycling industry. We need to take those services back into public ownership, as those cities have done.

Finally, if we are going to develop biorefining, biomass and so on, we must dramatically increase forest cover in this country, which is currently pathetic.

See this speech in context