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

As the Deputy has said, we are within the law. The six months starts from the time that section is commenced. I understand the Deputy's frustration. It is taking longer than expected. The problem is more complex than we thought. It will be delivered by the end of this year. Part of what we needed to do was commission a national circularity assessment and material flow analysis to understand the sectoral priorities and to understand how circular the Irish economy is or is not. What are the different bits that need to be improved? When you set targets, you have to make sure they are achievable, realistic and ambitious. To do that you need to sit down with the different sectors. In May, 100 stakeholders participated in the first round and then another 100 took part in June. The different sectors we are looking at are construction, agriculture, retail, packaging, textiles and electronic equipment. The Deputy makes the case that in order for this to work we need to have a sectoral compact and make sure we are not imposing targets and rules on different sectors. He says we should sit down with them and say let us all fix this problem together. The Deputy is pointing at the Dutch as an example of working sectoral compacts. I met with the Dutch embassy and have spoken with the Dutch. We are following that model, partly because it was proposed by Deputy Bruton during the drafting of the legislation. We are working on it and will get there this year. We will have sectoral compacts. The extent of producer responsibility in packaging for the deposit return scheme is an example of how the industry can sit down to make something work in practice.

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