Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein)

I thank Deputies Daly and Quinlivan for tabling this Bill. It is important legislation and something that will help many people across this State who are faced with huge bills they do not necessarily need to face.

It is a lot of anecdotal evidence but we all have personal experience of when the washing machine or something else breaks in the house and the repair person says that, because of the way it is constructed, it is uneconomical to repair it and sometimes, bizarrely, cheaper to replace it. That is the advice I have been given several times when the washing machine has broken down. You are told there is no point and it would be cheaper to buy a new one. I find that incredible. One of the rationales given to me by a repair person, which goes to the legislation we are discussing, is that, in the old days, the machines used to be made with much more durable parts. Where there was a metal part in a given machine, there is now plastic. The plastic heats up and cools down hundreds or thousands of times, so it goes brittle and breaks. That is the design. They are designed by the companies to make them cheaper, first of all, but also to make them less durable. Then the replacement parts are not available or they are so expensive it makes repair completely uneconomical. We see that happening time after time.

Expenses like this come out of the blue for families having real difficulties with their personal finances. These are not something that can be planned and there is no strategy. It just happens, and possibly at the worst time, like Christmas, a communion or back-to-school time. All of a sudden, people are faced with paying €300 to €500 for a new machine. That is the financial cost for individuals and families.

We can look at the manufacturers and ask whether it is by design or default that these machines do not last as long, but we must really focus our minds on the waste. We talk about a circular economy. The Rediscovery Centre is in Ballymun and I am not sure whether the Minister of State has ever visited but what it does to reuse things is incredible. It reuses in an imaginative way some of what we would normally throw away. I advise anyone listening to go the Rediscovery Centre because it is a brilliant place. What it is doing to recycle and upcycle a lot of material is just phenomenal. One of our local centres put up a post today about seven tins of paint. That is paint that would have been thrown away. People bring their bits of paint. There is now a paint recycling centre in there. It is top quality and you can get whatever colour you want, so go down to the Rediscovery Centre in Ballymun because it is really good.

Look at the amount of washing machines, cookers, microwaves, lawnmowers and laptops. There are a lot of laptops now that cannot be reused because of the software that is in them. I saw some figures that were shocking, namely, that 62 million tonnes of e-waste were generated every year, which is equivalent to 400 cruise ships, and just 15% to 22% of all e-waste ends up being recycled.

We are talking about ensuring we recycle and reduce as much as we possibly can, so for me this Bill is a no-brainer. This is something we should grab with both hands and move forward as quickly as we can to ensure that, when people buy a product, they have an understanding that product is made to last. We need to go back, in some ways, to the old days. In one sense, you can never go back, but it is something we need to do in this case. We need to look at what was done in the past where we had all this equipment that lasted years and years. Our mothers and fathers would have had washing machines or cookers that lasted years and years, whereas now you barely get two to three years out of them. That is by design and it is to ensure we throw things out and buy new equipment.

I again commend Deputies Daly and Quinlivan for tabling this Bill and I hope we move as quickly as we can with it.

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