Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein)
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Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit go dtí an Teach. We all know, and I have discussed previously with the Minister of State, that using raw materials unsustainably is the current model and that we need to overhaul our economic model from one that is based on "take, make, waste" to one that is circular. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" is probably the idea that is most commonly associated with the circular economy. The Minister of State will be aware we introduced, initially as an amendment to the Circular Economy and Miscellaneous Provisions Act but now as a stand-alone Bill, a proposal to ban companies dumping brand-new, unused products and prevent that material from entering the waste stream.

Today, however, I am focusing on products that are reusable even though they have entered the waste stream. According to the old saying, one person's trash is another person's treasure, and my dad cannot walk past a skip without having a look into it and seeing what is there. We need a more structured and formal system. Circular economy social enterprises have popped up. One of them, Camara, deals with computers, and there is also Liberty Recycling. Even the civic amenity review document cites the example of an organisation that goes into those civic amenities, takes the knobs and dials from electrical appliances and uploads information about them online, where people can access it. If someone needs, say, a dial for their oven that has gone out of production, they can go to the website and find a replacement. Of course, that makes absolute sense and it is an excellent initiative, and many similar enterprises also salvage reusable items from the waste stream.

I understand, however, that barriers prevent civic amenity operators from allowing such social enterprises salvage from their waste. The first issue relates to the provision of waste licences granted by the Environmental Protection Agency. Often, it precludes the operators from licensed waste facilities from allowing people to salvage from the waste even when they would like to. There could be a perfectly functional bike a child has grown out of or there might be furniture considered outdated to someone's taste that a waste disposal company is licence-bound not to pass on. The phrase used in many of the licences is that scavenging shall not be permitted at the facility. Even that language is outdated and I think the Minister of State will agree it comes from a different era. The word "scavenging" conjures images such as vermin or vultures coming in. We need a structured, formalised type of salvaging of useful items that does not have the same connotations, and it is an activity we should encourage. One-off organisations such as the Ballymun Rediscovery Centre show we can give a new lease of life to furniture, clothes and bicycles. The EPA-licensed site report on waste enforcement cites scavenging permitted on site as one area of non-compliance with the licence. In an era when we are more urgently trying to make our economy more circular, perhaps we need to take a second look at the blanket bans on salvaging.

The second issue has to do with the end-of-waste criteria. The end-of-waste framework holds that once an item enters the system of EPA-licensed facilities, when it is dropped off at a site or collected in a skip, that waste cannot leave the system without being granted an end-of-waste application. I understand we need to have safeguards and we do not want mica blocks ending up back on the market, but end-of-waste decisions are relatively rare in this country.

Senator Lynn Boylan:I think only three were completed in 2022. Will the Minister of State give me an update on the end-of-waste decisions and whether that will be rolled out more formally? We do not know the exact scale but we know certain items going into the waste stream could be reused or given a new life. I would like to hear the Minister of State's thoughts and views on the subject.

Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)
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The handling of waste within Ireland and all other member states is subject to the provisions of the waste framework directive. The directive defines what is waste and requires that waste be managed in a manner that does not endanger human health or the environment; that does not pose a risk to water, air, soil, plants or animals; that does not cause a nuisance through noise or odours; and that does not adversely affect the countryside or places of special interest. Irish waste legislation is in accordance with the directive, and it is not open to member states to deviate unilaterally from these requirements.

The directive also lays down criteria to determine when a waste material may cease to be considered a waste and become a product or a secondary raw material. These criteria are given effect in Ireland through the end-of-waste authorisation process operated by the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, which offers a valuable route for the reuse of materials. The Waste Action Plan for a Circular Economy, published in 2020, committed to a number of measures aimed at more fully realising the potential of the end-of-waste process to contribute to material reuse and a circular economy in Ireland. In fulfilment of these commitments, the Circular Economy and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2022 contains provision for the Minister to make regulations on the charging of fees, the format of applications and accompanying information, and the circumstances in which applications may be refused or rejected. Regulations are currently being drafted in this regard and they will be put forward for public consultation in the second quarter of this year.

In parallel with these requirements, the waste framework directive also establishes a five-step waste hierarchy, setting out an order of preference for the management and disposal of waste. In setting prevention as the highest tier, the hierarchy recognises that the best way to handle waste is to prevent it. The other steps on the hierarchy, in decreasing order of desirability, are reuse, recycling, recovery and, finally, disposal.

Over the past two decades Ireland has made significant progress in driving our performance up the waste hierarchy and moving away from disposal as our primary treatment option. We have come a long way from the 2005 finding of the European Court of Justice that we were “generally and persistently” failing to meet the requirements of the waste framework directive.

The Waste Action Plan for a Circular Economy builds on this progress through some 200 measures to be delivered over the five-year lifetime of the plan. Initiatives include the recently signed regulations for incentivised charging for commercial waste, the introduction of a deposit-and-return scheme for plastic bottles and aluminium cans, and environmental levies on single-use plastic items such as disposable coffee cups, and these will all help divert material away from disposal and further up the waste hierarchy.

In addition, the action plan goes further by recognising that waste policy cannot be a narrow consideration of how to treat the waste we produce but must be broader, moving away from the unsustainable linear consumption model and towards a circular economy. The Circular Economy and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2022 gives effect to this ambition. It provides a legal framework for moving from a focus on managing waste to a much greater focus on adapting patterns of production and consumption. The Act provides for several key measures in this regard, including the circular economy strategy, the EPA’s circular economy programme, the national food loss prevention roadmap, and the circular economy fund. The overarching national objective is to reduce our generation of waste and all policy levers are being set in that direction. Ensuring we maximise the utility of existing resources, waste or not, is central to the objectives.

Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein)
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I thank the Minister of State for his response. It does not address the scavenging element. We know that certain perfectly legal organisations are doing this on a bespoke basis. I am looking for a more formalised universal approach to that so it is not subject to the geographical lottery of where someone lives, for example, near Ballymun or near the civic amenity centre where they are collecting the dials for electrical appliances. We could be more ambitious about how we roll that out. I welcome that regulations will be introduced in quarter 2 and I look forward to engaging with the public consultation on those.

Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)
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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.