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

As the Senator said, there is a difference between salvage and scavenging. There are different circumstances. When a building is being knocked down, it has fireplaces, doors and windows which could be reused. That type of salvage is different from people climbing on top of a landfill, for example. Clearly a different level of risk is involved between mixed-up collected waste and something which may have been abandoned but is in perfectly good order. It is also different from informal salvage, people taking things from the top of their neighbour's skip with their permission, for example. Obviously, they do not need an EPA licence to do that; no one would suggest that. Bringing used coffee pods back to a shop does not require a collector's licence and so on.

The question is whether there is a problem we need to solve here. The Senator identified that. She said that, at particular civic amenity sites, social enterprises were finding a difficulty in recovering things like bicycles because it was considered it could be a breach of the EPA rules. I will consider that in detail. I will talk to the Rediscovery Centre, for example, and see if I can address that when I am making the regulations in the second quarter.