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

Those are all very reasonable questions. We are in the changeover period for this scheme. The changeover period is four months long. The reason there is a changeover period is so that the old stock on the shelves of the supermarkets can be sold off and at the same time the new stock which has the logos and the new bar codes is coming in. We could not change over overnight because that would have required dumping all the old stock. There would have been a lot of food waste so we had to pick a period of time for that changeover.

We chose a period of four months. We looked at other countries and saw that some of them had shorter periods, while others had longer periods. We think we chose the best length of time.

It is clear there are people who have bottles and cans at home. Half of the bottles and cans have logos while the other half do not. It is confusing when people bring them back to the shop. It is disappointing that half a person's products return money while the other half do not. There is a learning curve, particularly for retailers. Retailers have machines in place. It is like having a new photocopier in an office and not knowing how to change the paper. There was a very low volume of use at the very start but the number of people bringing back cans and bottles is now rapidly increasing. On the first day of the scheme, 5,000 cans and bottles were brought back. On the most recent day for which we have figures, more than 300,000 were brought back. Later in the year, the figure will probably be approximately 3 million or 4 million per day.

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