Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I am not sure if the Minister agrees or disagrees that the privatisation of waste collection has been a disaster. It has been a disaster for households faced with bills that go up and up, north of €300 now, while the likes of Greyhound, Panda and City Bin are making millions of euro in profits and are domiciled offshore so that they do not have to pay any tax on it. It has also been a disaster in terms of reducing the amount of waste we are collecting and increasing the percentage of that waste that gets recycled.

If we are serious about reducing waste, and that is the main thing we need to do, we need a mind shift away from blaming ordinary people, who have no choice about much of the packaging they get, and going to the root cause, which is the polluters. These are not ordinary households in the main but the big businesses that produce all the packaging to make their lives easier and to make their production processes simpler, cheaper and faster. This means bans on unnecessary and non-recyclable packaging and financial penalties to force companies to pay the full cost of recycling the waste they produce.

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