Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this legislation. It is positive that we are debating it. One thing that we should set as a benchmark is that no child should ever go to bed hungry. The reality is that no children will ever reach their full potential if they are sitting at a school desk, hungry. According to the State agency, Safefood, 10% of our population in Ireland lives in food poverty. As a food producing country and a major food exporter, we dump nearly 2 tonnes of food every single minute. As a country, we dump more than 1 million tonnes of food every single year. That is not including what comes from the agriculture sector. It is estimated that households in Ireland throw away one third of the food they purchase in the supermarket.

There is something fundamentally wrong in a system and a country where we dump so much food, yet so many people go hungry. We have so many children going hungry. The average annual cost of the food that Irish homes dump every year is €750, which is a substantial amount. There are initiatives to encourage people to plan their meals and shopping, to better use their leftovers and to dispose of food ultimately correctly. One of the biggest problems we face as a country is getting people to understand the difference between “use by” and “best before”. A large volume of food is dumped every year because of that simple misunderstanding. One thing I encourage people to do is to look into their bin and see what they are throwing out. I particularly encourage them to see what they are throwing into their bin that has remained unopened or unused because half of all the food that is dumped in Irish households is unopened or unused. If we could do that much it would be of great benefit in reducing food waste and emissions, as well as saving families a substantial amount.

I supported the issue of reducing food waste as Minister. We developed an initiative in County Roscommon with Roscommon County Council. We went around hotels and restaurants and worked directly with them to examine the profile of the food that they were dumping. Restaurants and hotels in the county were able to reduce their food costs by 30% on average through that process and continuing to monitor it. That is a substantial saving, particularly in an industry where margins are so tight. I was in the restaurant next door to my own office a couple of weeks ago, which is the Peppermill restaurant. They have a sign at the till, which states that when customers buy their breakfast, they do not automatically give them toast. Customers have to ask for toast. This not because they do not want to give people toast. I asked the manager and he told me that they were dumping buckets of bread every day when they automatically gave toast to people and it was not being used. By looking at what was going into their food bin every day, they altered the restaurant menu to reflect that. All of us as individuals, families and businesses, need to look at that.

The reality is that a certain volume of food will unavoidably go to waste, such as fruit and vegetable skins, etc. Yet, there is an inherent source of energy, nutrition and economic value in that waste. The last place it should go is into landfill. That is why when I was Minister, we took the decision to roll out brown bins on a phased basis to every home in Ireland. I was disappointed to hear from colleagues earlier that in some instances people had to seek out a brown bin, which should be available to them now. The objective is to gather up that waste resource and to reuse it to generate biogas. The residual is to be used as fertiliser, which is now today a valuable resource, particularly within the agricultural community.

Speaking of a resource, which food waste is, it also has a huge impact on our climate emissions. The discussion about climate change has focused on energy generation, on how we choose to travel and on how we choose to heat our homes. However, food has a substantial climate impact. The carbon footprint of wasted food globally is estimated to be 3.3 Gt. If food waste was a country, it would rank only behind the United States and China in greenhouse gas emissions. What is hugely frustrating when discussing the issue of poverty is enough food is being produced in the world today to feed the population. However, because of our wastefulness and inefficiency people still go hungry. People still go hungry in Ireland today. We talk about food security, which is a topical issue. There is also a huge environmental and economic imperative that we address it. Ireland has an opportunity to be a global leader in how to dramatically reduce food waste and in how to manage the waste being generated in a far more responsible manner.

This is not just about the issue of food waste. We are a food producing country; it is probably the single biggest natural resource we have. However, all our natural resources need to be managed in a far more responsible way. We must ensure that we manage those resources to protect our planet. One issue that has emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as from the crisis we are now seeing as a result of war in Ukraine, is that it will hopefully bring about a different economic model. The economic model up to now has been a global economic model whereby one part of a product is produced in one part of the world and then value is added to it in another part of the world. We all need to look at how we can live within our own resources, within our own countries and within our own communities, rather than relying on imports and resources from another part of the world, which may have a detrimental economic and environmental impact there.

Technologists, scientists and engineers have a significant role to play in how they design these products. They should design them in the most economical terms and they should minimise the use of natural resources. They should also minimise the use of the volume of energy that is both used to produce the product in the first place, and that is used in the product’s consumption of energy over its lifespan. We have to design the manufacturing process in such a way that generates as little pollution as possible, not just at the time of its manufacture, but during its lifetime and in relation to its end-of-life disposal.

The idea of a life cycle of a product needs to change. Priority needs to be given first to repairing a product. People say that it is all well and good to talk about repairing something, but where do you actually go and do that? Over the past 20, 30 or 40 years, we have seen those skill sets disappearing. We had people who could repair products. There was a tradition and a culture of that in Ireland. When we go to Africa or Asia, we see how people repurpose and repair items on a regular basis, rather than buying something new. I recall a number of years ago when Roscommon County Council produced a booklet of different businesses around the county that were involved in the repair sector. These included repairing clothes, bicycles and phones. This was so that people knew where they could get their shoes or phones repaired.

Whether it was repairing clothes, bicycles or telephones, a person knew where he or she could get his or her shoes or phone repaired. That developed into a nationwide initiative. A person who needs a washing machine or radio repaired can log on to the repairmystuff.iewebsite and see where he or she can actually get that done. In fact, now, with regard to some heavy goods such as furniture, people actually call to people's homes and carry out those repairs rather than having to transport the items. That creates jobs within our local communities and economy rather than importing a new suite of furniture or a radio from the other side of the world where a huge volume of energy and natural resources were used to create that product in the first place.

We need to ensure that we actually reuse products more. Again, this comes back to scientists and engineers and how the product is designed. Instead of designing the latest mobile phone that one must replace after two years when the battery begins to wear out, products should be designed in such a way that if the battery goes, the battery is replaced and not the entire mobile phone. There needs to be a legal responsibility on the manufacturers to extend the lifespan of a product rather than having it for just two years only to dump it and buy a new phone, washing machine or whatever the case may be. It needs to be built in at the concept and design stage of that particular product.

The last option should be to recycle. Sadly, at the moment, there is this perception in society that it is a good thing to recycle. It is far better to recycle a product than to dump it in a bin that ends up either in landfill or incineration. Recycling is not the solution, however. We should ensure insofar as is possible that we minimise the number of products we put into the recycling bin and maximise the reuse of individual products, and only at the end of that process do we actually put it into recycling. When we recycle a product, a huge amount of energy has to be put into that product to repurpose it again. Even if it is glass bottles, which can be recycled generation after generation, a huge amount of energy needs to be put into that bottle to bring it onto the supermarket shelf again. It is the same with regard to plastics and, of course, there is a finite lifespan to a particular plastic bottle. It cannot be continually recycled; it has a specific lifespan.

On that issue, we are talking about a circular economy strategy that looks at all these big, weighty plans such as the waste action plan and UN sustainable development goals. Something very basic also needs to be included in the thinking of every product that is produced and put on to the market in the first place.

Those are the seven principles of universal design whereby we look at anything we design in such a way that it can be used by the maximum number of people. The genius who designed the scissors, for example, came up with a great idea if a person is right-handed but if he or she is ciotóg, it is not much good. That person actually has to get a specific scissors. How and why were scissors not designed that could have universal use? It is possible to very simply design scissors to do that.

It was obviously a man who designed the seat belt. I do not think any woman would have designed a seat belt in the way they are designed. We need to think about everyone in society when we are designing a product. People with ranging abilities, whether they be physical abilities or other capacities, must be taken into account and consideration when we design a product in the first place. We must take that into account at the start of that process, not down the road when we have generated a large volume of waste as a result of something that can only be used by a small proportion of our population.

Society, science, technology and engineering have a vital role to play in eliminating the generation of many these types of waste in the first place and reducing our overall climate emissions. I recall that when I was Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, we established the climate action fund specifically to drive innovation in Ireland to design unique solutions to deal with the unique climate challenges we have. Sadly, very little funding to date has gone into that particular aspect of climate change but, hopefully, that fund will drive the type of radical innovation needed to deal with the unique climate challenges we have here and not try to take a continental European solution and shoehorn it into an Irish model.

To give the Minister of State a practical example of what we are talking about in that regard, we often hear that the solution to our transport emissions in Ireland is public transport. In a densely populated country in continental Europe, that will solve the problem. It would solve the problem in our cities but when 37% of our population lives in isolated rural communities, that will not solve the problem. Some of the environmental geniuses say we need to shove everyone who is living in rural Ireland into towns and that will solve the problem. That will be many generations down the road long after we have dealt with the climate crisis we have at the moment. Delivering broadband in order that people do not have to sit in their cars in the first place actually provides a practical solution. Broadband probably has a far more significant climate impact here than anywhere else globally.

Let us look at our unique challenges and design unique solutions. We can be a global leader in that regard. We also need to ensure that we ban plastics for which alternatives are available. I am not talking about taxing them. If there is an alternative, they should be banned outright. Second, tax those plastics for which we do not have a practical alternative available today. One of those particular plastics, which is probably the single biggest problem microplastic globally, is to be found in cigarettes butts. Every cigarette butt contains 12,000 strands of plastic that go into our watercourses, rivers and oceans to be consumed by our fish and, ultimately, we consume that. That is one thing we need to address urgently.

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