Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to pick up on a couple of points that the Minister of State made. He is correct in saying that the EU is introducing a regulation but we already know from the trilogue negotiations that the proposal is for it not to be implemented immediately. There will be a delay in the enactment of the EU regulation. The first Amazon fulfilment centre opened here in October 2022 and we implored the Minister of State, when legislation on the circular economy was being brought forward, to act then before a problem was created here. No doubt, we potentially have a problem with anybody who sells online but once the Amazon fulfilment centre opened, we knew we would definitely have a problem because this is part of Amazon's business model. This is what the company actively does. It has admitted it and has been exposed in numerous EU member states. Now we have a fulfilment centre in Ireland. It has been here for a year and God knows how many items have been dumped in that time.

As the Minister of State said, it is absolutely imperative that commercial bodies segregate their waste, as householders have been doing for a long time, but this is not waste we are talking about but unsold products. What we have heard from the French evaluation process is that there has not been a single case of textiles being dumped in the last three years since the legislation was introduced in that country. Regarding Amazon, what the French have found is that there has been a marked increase in the number of donations from the company's fulfilment centres. One of the loopholes causing concern is around the damaging of goods and how that might be policed. My Bill addresses the issue of the wilful damaging of products. Of course, compliance is key but we have covered the loophole that exists in the French legislation in terms of retailers marking products that are perfectly good as damaged in order to get around the legislation.

While we do not have exact statistics on the volume of products that are being dumped, we can listen to the experts on this. As I said, DHL, which is an international shipping company, has asked its customers about this. It has found that there has been a 19% increase in returns and that 17% of businesses are dealing with those returns through disposal. Optoro, a logistics company that works with online retailers in managing returns, has said that 50% of items are dumped. Amazon alone, as we discussed previously, has 175 fulfilment centres. If one extrapolates from the exposés in France or Britain, we are talking about 1 billion items a year being dumped.The scale of the problem is enormous. We do not have time to wait; we need to be bold. We need to be more like the French and not wait around for the EU regulations, which are lesser and - I cannot use the word "radical" - not as ambitious as the French legislation.

On transport, it was admitted again by Alma Dufour that you cannot stop companies transporting to other countries. Compliance is key, and resourcing of procedures relating to non-compliance is one of the elements they think will come out of the evaluation process. We live on an island. The fact that companies might possibly transport waste elsewhere is not it a reason to not do things. We have to crack down on this business model. The legislation before the House is constructive. It is trying to do something that other countries have already pushed ahead and done. The Minister of State said he is not opposed to this, but I do not get any impression that it will be implemented. That is disappointing.