Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The circular economy idea reflects a complete change of mindset. I believe the Deputy, as an economist, will recognise we are completely changing the way we think about how our economy works. We started with the idea of taking things out of the ground, constructing things out of them and then throwing them away in a field or alternatively setting them on fire and putting their elements back into the atmosphere. To move away from that idea of take, make and dispose and to move towards this new idea that we can keep resources within the economy, that we can be richer without consumption and that exhausting our finite resources as quickly as possible is not a smart idea or a way to discover prosperity for society represents an enormous change in the way people think about things.

I believe it is right to get people to buy into that change before we move to the metrics. However, the Deputy is right; we cannot manage something unless we measure it. We need key metrics and targets that are very clear and understandable. The Deputy has made a good suggestion to eliminate "best before" and "sell by" dates. That is something that can be considered. We also need to have very clear targets, such as halving something or doubling something. That is absolutely right and we will be moving quickly towards that. The first stage is to convince people that it makes sense to retain resources within society. I think we are winning that argument and getting people on that side. We are also doing that at a European level. We are getting away from the idea that the quicker people ruin something or use something, the richer everybody is. We need to move away from planned obsolescence. It is a design problem and design problems are difficult to cope with. Our pharmaceutical and IT sectors have done very well in design and have very skilled people. We are a knowledge economy and we can conquer this.

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