Paddy Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. I compliment Senator Boylan on bringing forward the Bill. Nothing ever stays the same. The longer we live, the more we know. I knew very little about this type of practice until the Bill was brought forward by Senator Boylan and Senator McGahon asked me to take in on his behalf from the Fine Gael side. There was a time that my wife and I were involved in the fashion business. There was a term in use at that stage, namely, "cabbage", which referred to lines of fashion that were oversupplied and were sold off at certain times of the year at a discounted price, where there was too much production. This is completely new now. When I looked at the Bill I thought there is very little production here of textiles or, for that matter, electronics.

Senator Boylan made a lot of sense. We have these great big stores from Amazon and items are sent out online and go back to a central distribution station, where they feel it is easier to dump them than recycle them, do anything with them or send them for incineration. That is a complete change in the past ten or 20 years from when products were sold off at a discounted rate when there was an oversupply. Now we have a system where there is an oversupply and when returns come back, they go to incineration or to landfill because it is cheaper to do that. The Bill makes perfect sense.

Where do we draw the line? The likes of Amazon order on the basis of what they think they are going to sell. The manufacturer is probably in a different country or wherever and they manufacture X number of something. There is an oversupply, more than likely, and we have seen from the figures given by Senator Boylan that €13 million worth of hygiene products were dumped last year. Our job and that of the Minister of State is to get them to get their act together in order that there is not an oversupply. If there is an oversupply, as Senator Boylan has said, items should be recycled. That should be part of the circular economy. It should not be going to landfill and if it is going to landfill or incineration, there should be a fine or mechanism to punish people for doing that.

The Bill is very short. It makes perfect sense to me. As I said, production is very small in these areas. Most of this stuff is produced in other countries. It is not a big problem from a legislative point of view, I suppose, but it will have a bearing on how the likes of Amazon and other companies like it operate in this country and how they are going to deal with oversupply and returns. That is the kernel of Senator Boylan's Bill. It is the oversupply and returns that something has to be done with. The Senator is suggesting they should be part of the circular economy, that the items should be distributed in various ways to people who are in need or that there should be some way of curtailing the production lines in other countries. That should be done by Amazon and similar companies; they should not be ordering so much in advance. Their production lines and the scale of production should be watched more closely. As Senator Gavan has pointed out, under mass production it is so cheap to produce an awful lot compared with a smaller amount. There is less of a cost in carrying out mass production. That is basically the Bill. It is a good Bill. If there is as much going into landfill and incineration as Senator Boylan points out to us, some action should be taken. The Bill goes part of the way in doing that.