Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I also welcome our guests from VOICE, the environmental NGO.

This is an important debate. The Sinn Féin Seanad team has tabled this Bill because we are fully supportive of the need to move to a circular economy. Our planet has finite resources and we cannot continue to waste them in a take-make-waste business model. A key problem that we believe was not addressed in the circular economy Bill is that big corporations are dumping perfectly good products which have not been used. This is the most wasteful scenario conceivable in a linear economy. All of the waste associated with the mining of raw materials and the energy and labour that goes into manufacturing and distributing the product, only for it to go into the bin without delivering any benefit, is unconscionable, particularly in view of the environmental crisis we mace on multiple fronts. The Bill is a necessary step in the context of addressing this.

The Bill states that producers, importers and distributors of new non-food products intended for sale but that remain unsold are forbidden from destroying or dumping such items. Instead, they are required to take proactive measures to reuse these products. One way to achieve this is by donating them to charities, NGOs, second-hand shops or social enterprises. To ensure there is the necessary flexibility, these can be defined by the Minister for the Environment, Climate, and Communications.

The Bill also provides a definition for "non-food products" but it is not an exhaustive list. It includes items such as electronic products, textiles, clothes, shoes, furniture, ink cartridges, hygiene products, food preservation and cooking equipment as well as leisure products, books and school equipment. We have seen these being dumped in the public domain. It is important to note that there are exceptions to these obligations. The Bill acknowledges that certain products may pose serious risks to health or safety when reused or recycled. Therefore, the requirements outlined in subsection (1) do not apply to those products. Additionally, products whose disposal is already prescribed or whose material recovery is prohibited are exempted as well.

To enforce these provisions, the Bill establishes penalties for non-compliance. Any person or entity found guilty of disposing products contrary to subsection (1) will be deemed to have committed an offence. Upon summary conviction, they shall be liable to a fine not exceeding €3,000 for each such offence. Given the scale of the problem, fines of €3,000 would quickly rack up and be a disincentive to the practice.

There was an opportunity to take decisive action in the circular economy Bill. There was a lot of media attention on the Government Bill, which Sinn Féin supported, but it focused on the latte levy, which we still hear about on the airwaves. Approximately 30 of the 70 pages of that legislation focused on tackling littering by individuals and allowing councils to set up CCTV operations. Meanwhile, amendments tabled by Sinn Féin, which were based on this Bill, were not accepted. The excuse we heard was that the EU was working on similar provisions to ban this corporate practice.

We fear that the EU Council's position that was agreed in May only covers the dumping of textiles. I understand that it does not cover the dumping of all of the other items that are included in the Bill. EU legislation takes a very long time to work through the system and to be eventually transposed into national law. Given the scale of the problem with dumping we do not have this time to wait. We should show the same leadership as other countries such as France, which has implemented a very similar law to the Bill. Scotland is also in the process of including such a ban in its circular economy legislation.

Most individuals would be shocked to know that up to 50% of the items they return to online retailers are dumped. For all the focus there is on how to be sustainable, and people are trying to do their best, it will come as a shock to many that after they make the effort to put a product back in the box, be it an item of clothing or something that has never been opened, and go through the process of sending it back to a supplier, it is then put straight into landfill or incineration. Most people at home would be shocked to know this is happening. We know the Bill will not fix everything to do with the model that facilitates this type of business but it does highlight Sinn Féin’s commitment to tackling systemic change rather than focusing on individual measures and putting the guilt on individual people.

For years it has been endemic in the fashion industry to overproduce stock only for it to go straight from the rails to landfill. My colleagues will elaborate more on these practices. It has become rampant in other product ranges since the pandemic, when more people became accustomed to buying their products online. For example, hygiene products are dumped.If we extrapolate from the figures for France because we do not have the data for Ireland, we could say that on a per capitabasis some €13 million of hygiene and beauty products are destroyed in Ireland each year. We are in a cost of living crisis and people are finding it very difficult to buy basic necessities, yet these companies are literally dumping hygiene products straight into the bin. Another sector where dumping unused goods is practised is the furniture and kitchen appliances sector. Again, we lack the official statistics but to get a sense of the scale of the problem, figures from France suggest that 2.3% of all furniture on the French market is not sold, of which 46% is directly destroyed or recycled. To extrapolate from those figures to Ireland on a per capitabasis, that is around 1,097 microwaves or 1,567 kettles, which would bring about savings of 279 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

I want to focus on one of the biggest offenders in regard to this practice, which, as we know because of the public exposés, is Amazon. Ireland now has its first fulfilment centre, which opened recently just down the road from where I live. We know from a 2018 exposé in Germany that Amazon was guilty of dumping thousands of products there. A 2019 undercover exposé in France found that up to 3 million products were dumped across fulfilment centres in France. Even more recently, a 2020 undercover exposé in Britain found that 130,000 items were being dumped per week in one fulfilment centre there.

The Amazon lobbyists have been really proactive on my Bill, which I suppose demonstrates that we are doing the right thing if we are aggravating the likes of Amazon. They sent a letter outlining their business model and their concerns with this Bill. When we read the letter, Amazon comes across as very impressive and a model company but we need to actually drill down into the detail of what it is saying. The Amazon representatives mention that it has purchased three renewable windfarms and that when they come online, they will power 185,000 Irish homes. They do not mention that their data centres are contributing to a 30% increase in electricity demand and they do not mention what their data centres do. We know that Amazon Web Services actually goes out and targets the business of fossil fuel companies to extract oil far quicker and to save those fossil fuel companies about €10 billion annually.

Most importantly, when they address the substance of the Bill, they state that since the launch of fulfilment by Amazon donations, it has helped third-party sellers to donate more than 100 million items worldwide to people and organisations in need, including households and schools. That is very impressive - 100 million items since the launch of this scheme. In their letter, they do not say when the scheme launched, so I went off and found that it was in 2019, so it is three and a half years since the scheme was launched. Again, 100 million items sounds very impressive but when we break it down, it is about 28 million products per year. If we look at the exposés and take Britain as an example, it had 130,000 per fulfilment centre, and, according to its own website, Amazon had 175 fulfilment centres. To extrapolate from that, 130,000 items per week works out at approximately 1 billion items per year that are being dumped by Amazon fulfilment centres. Amazon is boasting about 100 million items in three and a half years when it is actually responsible for dumping about 1 billion items per year.

I welcome what I hear from the Minister of State, which is that he is not going to oppose the Bill, and he might confirm that. When we hear those figures, we know that is just one company but we do not know if it is doing it in Ireland, although we can assume it is doing this if it is doing it in France, Germany and Britain. We do not have time to wait for the EU. If the Minister of State is not going to oppose the Bill, I ask him to facilitate the time to allow it to progress so we can show the same leadership as has been shown in France. I will hand over to my colleague, Senator Gavan.