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

Our national policy, which is also a European policy, is to move towards a circular economy. However, what on earth is a circular economy? Do people understand that and do Members of the House understand it?

When you have old shoes repaired in the shoemaker's instead of buying new ones, you are participating in the circular economy. You might choose to have your clothes repaired or decide you are not going to buy a new vacuum cleaner. Instead, you might find something to repair it. You may decide that you are going to have your old bicycle in the shed fixed up instead of buying a new one. All these things are participation in a circular economy. It is when you make that decision to keep and repair the goods you have, keep those resources, shop locally and provide the labour to somebody who is working in the local economy, and provide the money there to avoid having to dispose of goods, whether they are incinerated or sent to landfill. To reuse is better than recycling and it avoids goods being shipped halfway around the world.

It is common sense that we cannot achieve sustainable prosperity by rushing as fast as we can to deplete our finite resources, and yet, that was our measure of economic success for many years. We measured GDP by the amount of consumption, and the more consumption, the better. Luckily, at some point, economic consensus and the Central Statistics Office, CSO, decided that GDP was not the right measure, that it did not represent success and prosperity, and that we needed new measures.

With that in mind, I have been working on the Waste Action Plan for a Circular Economy, which is a set of steps for how we can move towards a circular economy. It was published last year and will be revised with more detailed plans and targets because we need to know how we are making progress towards a circular economy and the new metrics we need to do so.

Part of this is not just theoretical. Of course, I have to spend significant time going out to people who work in the circular economy, re-upholstering furniture or fixing clothing, and asking them what they need to prosper and how they are at a disadvantage to somebody who is producing or importing goods from the other side of the world. They say to me they have problems with insurance, sourcing parts, getting labour and want favourable tax treatment. Of course, all of those things will be addressed.

The Government has a role in all of this. We cannot achieve these goals by moving to a circular economy entirely through individual action. The State has a large role. It is involved in the purchase of €16 billion worth of goods and services every year through its procurement frameworks. One of the things we decided last year in the programme for Government was to green all our procurement frameworks to make sure when the State to do its purchasing, it could do so in a green way and we could train up the procurement officers in how to buy green. It is not always obvious. If you want to buy green paper, for example, the best thing to do is not look for what is the most recycled paper but to get printers that only print when you are there with your ID card. This manages to reduce printing by 80% of wasted volume.

The EPA recently published its much-awaited green procurement guidelines, seven years since their previous publication. They concentrate on ten sectors and have been written with great advice from Abby Semple, whom I thank for that and name her for her work on that. They have been done in co-operation between the EPA and the Office of Government Procurement and cover areas such as energy, catering, cleaning, lighting, textiles, vehicles and so on. They give us the option for how the State can buy green, but we need to go beyond that. We need to go beyond providing options to the State on how to choose green. The next step is for the Government to rule we must take those options, that they must be mandatory, and that we cannot have a situation in which someone is building a public sector building and installing a fossil fuel boiler which will run for the next 25 years.

Our authority as a Government is more in our actions than our words and it is important we lead by example and move towards doing all the things we are asking the public to do. With regard to electric vehicles, for example, the State has not gone far enough and must towards its own fleet of electric vehicles and pass by the hurdles and obstacles. An Post has done very well at this. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, in a joint venture between ESB and Vodafone called SIRO, has moved towards electric vehicles. The rest of the State has to do that too and it will have to be done in a mandatory way. We have those examples and pilot programmes and now we need to move on.

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