Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The idea of circular economy and waste management is certainly not new to most people who grew up in rural Ireland. My father worked all his life fixing farm machinery. My brother had what was basically a scrapyard. He took in old beaten-down cars. Everyone who had an old banger that they wanted to keep going would come to him. If the radiator had burst, they would get one from him. All of the materials of the car were sent off to be recycled. My brother now leases out that site and does not do that business any more. The concept of all of that is something that most people will embrace and it is something they will want to do.

I was just thinking about how, in recent weeks, the fridge in our house started to make a lot of noise. When I pulled it out and looked underneath, there was a little fan running beside the cooler. One of the plastic blades had broken off and was tipping away and making a noise. I went to spares.iebut could not get a replacement. I tried all of the various websites before ringing a repairman who told me that because the fridge was about ten years old, I would not get a fan for it. It is just a little bit of plastic that would not cost 10 cent to make. The fridge is still working but it is a bit noisy. We will put up with it for another while but the point is that the companies that manufacture goods and sell them to us have a responsibility to manufacture spare parts not just for the time it wants to, thereafter forcing you to buy a new product, but as we move into the future. That is one thing we must ensure is put in place.

Others have talked about the role of the corporate sector in all of this. That is key. We know that disposable cups and all of those things are a problem but the biggest producer of all of this waste is the corporate sector. It is produced when corporations decide to cast aside a particular model of a given product and come out with a new one. Everyone believes that a washing machine is supposed to last four or five years, at which point you throw it out and get a new one. I saw the same thing with our own washing machine a number of years ago. The bearing went on it and it started to make noise. You would have thought there was an aeroplane taking off. I talked to a repair guy and was told that you could not get the bearings any more and that you had to get the entire drum, which was as dear as a new washing machine. What do you do in that situation but throw it out? That is going on all of the time.

It is not just an Irish problem but a global problem and it needs to be recognised as that. As materials like that are being dealt with, we need to ensure the corporate sector manufactures items in a way that they are fixable and people are trained to fix them. We need to have an economy focused on that and not the other economy which is about the cast away and start again.

I was glad to see the provision at the end of the Bill with regard to coal mining and hydraulic fracking of fossil fuels and gases from tight-gas sandstone reservoirs. We had a big campaign in our part of the world, in Leitrim and West Cavan, about how bad hydraulic fracking and extracting gas in that way can be for the environment. However, if it is bad for us to do here in Ireland, it is bad to be taking gas from any other country doing the same thing. That point needs to be made. We need to recognise that we are a global economy. It is not just an economy, but a global ecology. If something is bad here, it is bad in Pennsylvania or anywhere else. We should not be buying into it. We should not allow temporary problems, such as the situation in Ukraine, as extreme and horrible as it is, resulting in shortages of oil, to lead to our economy being held to ransom.

While amendments and improvements to the Bill are required, it is moving in the right direction and a great deal more work needs to be done.

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