John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On the previous Deputy's point about Covanta, I remember in the last Dáil as Dublin spokesperson going down to the Irish Water sewage treatment plant. I was told, and it is an analogy I have kept in my head since, that the sewage that flows into that plant is the equivalent of the volume of water that flows in the River Dodder from source to sea in a 24-hour period. It is cleansed to a certain degree and then goes out to sea.

Speakers have referred to plastic bottles, 80% of which still end up in landfill. It takes 1,000 years for each bottle to decompose. In the United States, there are not 2 million bottles but 2 million tonnes of plastic bottles in landfill that have been discarded.

The Minister of State will have heard the news yesterday that plastic particles have been found in human bloodstreams for the first time. We have been aware of such particles being found in fish, and we eat those fish. A study published in the journal Environment Internationaltested 22 anonymous blood samples and found plastic particles in 80% of people tested, indicating such particles may be able to travel round the body and lodge in organs.

Politics owes the Green Party and the green movement a great debt in terms of highlighting and bringing the need for climate action to the fore. I feel comfortable saying it is now a mainstream topic. The Green Party is particularly good at the legislative and macro pieces but is not as radical as I would like to be in terms of micro measures implemented on the ground. If it is proved that microparticles from plastic bottles are found in the human body, why do we not just ban them? Here is a practical solution. Given all the plastic bottled water for sale in our shops, why do we not encourage the big water bottling companies to supply substantial water fonts to these supermarkets and let me bring my glass bottle or three glass bottles and fill them up every time I shop? If I want to purchase, why must I purchase plastic all the time?

This is serious. We are bringing in a tax on plastic cups. Why not ban them? If people want coffee, let us bring our own cups. The best way to do that is ban the sale of these. That leads to another issue. Everybody buys coffee now, including me. When you go into the shop, it is not just the cups. You have the slim, little wooden paddle sticks, which get used once and are thrown into waste. They are never recycled. There are the coffee grains. They get thrown in the same bag. There are fast food companies that I will not name which offer the grains to customers free of charge.

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