Bríd Smith criticises circular economy bill as too weak on plastics

Thank you very much, Deputy Stan Lee. Now we go to People Before Profit, Deputy Brie Smith, sharing with Deputy Boyd Barrett. Yes, I am indeed. Goer maaf goethe, Cian Coorle. 317,000, that's the number of tonnes of plastic generated in Ireland in 2020, and 93,000, that's the number of tonnes of that plastic that was recycled, less than 30%. So, as somebody who really cares about the environment and recognises that of all the marine litter in the European Union, 70% of it is represented by only 10 of the most commonly found single-use plastic items. So, I can really appreciate where this bill is coming from. In fact, the last time that we took action on banning plastics about a year ago, it was to ban all plastic cutlery. Voila, exhibit A. That little fork is sold in this house, along with fruit, and it's a plastic fork, and I thought we had banned them. And I think there's a lot of stuff goes under the radar. Now, I'm not the big police chief of plastic, but I am passionately concerned that we produce way too much of it, we use way too much of it, and that this bill, although it's very welcome, and it was welcome to a great excitement in my party, when we thought, oh great, it's a circular economy bill, let's have a good look at this and see what it'll do in terms of the environment. It does not tackle the real polluters, the fossil fuel industry, the plastic industries, those that make and produce the plastics and make the most profits from them. And I think that's a real shame, Minister. I think it's a real shame, and it's a habit that the Green Party in particular are in danger of repeating. Aside from the interlinked issue of the climate crisis, I can think of no more important issue that we could deal with, and it goes to the heart of dealing with our environmental crisis, but also with how we deal with the planet's finite resources. They are finite, and they're being exploited and overused in a massive way, and the way we produce and constantly produce and reproduce and push in economies all the time to have more and more products is not sustainable. It is simply not sustainable. And because it is the very basis of the system, the capitalist system under which we live, we're going to have to think about that and think about ways of challenging that system. And that's why I think it's really important that in a modern capitalist society where there's exploitation, overfishing, exploitation of marine life, depletion of natural resources, depletion of natural minerals, overuse of fresh water, disruption to the global hydrological cycle, burning, regardless of the consequences of carbon and fossil fuels, the destruction of rare earth minerals, the destruction of forestry and so on. We do need a strong, robust bill that addresses all of that. It would, in fact, a bill of that nature would tackle the planned obsolescence inherent in much of the world's global production and supply networks. It would fund and enshrine the right to repair and ban the use of damaging chemicals in production. And it would support locally grown and healthy food production. And it would regulate and use bans and restrictions on how our finite resources are ultimately being exploited. And to do that in a concrete way, to even begin the process to build or aspire to a genuine circular economy, is, in fact, to challenge the very basis of production under the sort of capitalist economy which we have. Because the whole basis of production in that economy is the unrestrained use of our natural resources with no regards to the natural limits, no regards to the consequences of that production or the commodification of every possible resource like water, clean air, decent food, things that are essential for life. Externalities is a phrase used by economists to categorise the costs and the damage done by this model of production. The pollution, the despoilation, the overuse and the depletion of natural gifts. But this is not, in fact, an unfortunate aside or an unforeseen consequence. They are essentially, and at the heart, of how production for profit takes place. If externalities were truly costed and paid for by the oil, gas and plastics and petrochemical industries, all those industries would be bankrupted by now. The system effectively privatises profits and socialises environmental destruction. So the idea of a circular economy is absolutely at the centre of an insane response to the multiple environmental crises that we face. But, as with every policy that seeks to address a crisis or an aspect of capitalism, it is often mangled from the original concept of the system itself, to being co-opted into the idea of extracting maximum financial reward from any product, any activity or any resource. From the core idea of an economy moving away from the model of take, make, throw away, towards the idea of create more, repair more, reuse more and carefully use the gifts that nature has benefit all of society with, and not for the profit of a tiny minority. Move away from a system based, as Rachel Carson says, on the gods of profit and production. Our problem with this bill is that it does not deliver on its goal. No one bill or any one piece of legislation can, because it would challenge the very fabric of capitalist production. The bill does not really have an aspiration at all in that direction. In the 93 sections that the bill has, what consumes the largest space? Is it banning single-use plastics like the fork I just used in Exhibit A? Or is it fining producers or covering a greater range of products that those producers will be held responsible for at the end of the life of those products? Is it banning harmful chemicals that are used in creating packaging? Banning pesticides? Perhaps start looking at how the privatisation of waste management has actually damaged the goals of reducing waste and safeguarding the environment? No, the largest block of this bill is concerned with the use of CCTV cameras by local authorities and recordings made by mobile phones by officials. I note the frustration of all the deputies who have been local authority councillors and who have expressed that frustration here today. While I really do understand the issue of legal dumping and fly tipping is a big, big problem. For example, Dublin City Council spends a million euro a year on average cleaning up just on the streets for the fly tipping that happens. While the companies that were privatised and make vast profits from bin charges contribute absolutely nothing to the project of dealing with the fly tipping. And fly tipping, a lot of it happens because people cannot afford ever increasing costs on bin charges, particularly in poorer communities. But to be honest with you, CCTV is all over my estate, for example, but nobody looks at it. Nobody looks at it because the staffing levels in the council are cut back. The staffing levels in the Garda station are otherwise affected. Nobody watches the CCTV coverage. Now, I don't know about rural Eclair or East Galway, but certainly in big cities like Dublin, I imagine it's the same in Limerick, Cork, Waterford etc. Nobody in the local authorities actually watches this stuff. And the chunk of the bill that is concerned with this is actually very worrying. I think it's disturbing to say the least. We face widespread pollution from industrial sources that are damaging our rivers and our urban and rural areas. We have crises in water quality and water management. We have a boom in mining activities that is triggered by a rush for certain scarce and rare minerals, with the fears of long-term damage to our river and water courses. And so the campaign against mining in Ireland came, have given out statistics here that the global gold industry has been a driver for a mining rush in Ireland. To the extent that Ireland North and South has been identified as a hotspot for the European mining boon. And today 27% of the South of Ireland and 25% of the North of Ireland has been concessioned for mineral prospecting licences. And most of it is in areas like the Sperrins in County Tyrone, Derry, Donegal and Connemara, rural communities in Wicklow all being affected. In some of our most beautiful areas of pristine beauty, we have issued hundreds of licences for mining to Canadian and other global corporations. So these things conflict with each other. Producing a bill on the circular economy and doling out licences for mining to that extent all over the country is actually a conflict of interest. I am struck, however, by the similarity with the Climate Action Bill. Again, a much anticipated piece of legislation that did attempt to address a key environmental crisis. But a bill which suffered from vague language and multiple get-out clauses in addressing that crisis. And so in this bill, we see the repeated use of the word may. We made this, we made that. There are a lot of strategies, a lot of plans. Roadmaps to be constructed at a later stage. And actually very little use of the state's ability to regulate and ban harmful activities. While on one level, we welcome the efforts to address the single use of plastic. It has to be said that the time taken and the various loopholes that allow for continued production in the coming years, continued production of said plastic is very worrying. It has been pretty clear that alternatives in almost all of the products discussed here are possible, aside from a relatively small need in medical and some specialised cases. From the position that we know that we have now, our marine environment is drowning in plastic. 70% of all marine litter, as I said earlier on, comes from the 10 most commonly found single use plastics. In Ireland, we produce up to 80% more plastic packaging per head than the rest of Europe. And where we generate 27% more municipal waste than the European average. We should have seen stronger and more robust timelines and actions. So, yes, we welcome the banning of some of the single use plastics. But the timelines here for banning are worrying. And, of course, we can bring amendments to the table and move instead to bring them forward. But the charge for disposable cups is not what is needed given the scale of the crisis. It has smacks a bit of the carbon tax that you punish the behaviour of people rather than that of the corporations and the producers of the waste. The lack of definite targets, I note the version of the Minister where it says, again, where it says may introduce targets in the future and introduce targets for a waste management plan. But it would be preferable to have seen those targets here. Again, we will try to amend it in that way. Until we see a circular economy strategy, a circular economy programme or the food waste prevention strategy, it is hard, if not impossible, to know how seriously to take this bill. In short, I welcome that it does mention the circular economy but puzzled by the fact that it seems to attach such little of that economy in the here and now. I am alarmed, however, at the future plan to deal with food waste as one of the key policies having regard to Food Vision 2030. A policy that has correctly been labelled by farmers who are interested in sustainability as an expansion plan for Ireland to become a world leader in sustainable greenwashing. Heavy on spin while thrashing the Paris Treaty obligation, a policy which embeds the model of dairy expansion and creating more markets abroad should not be mentioned in the same breath as the idea of food waste prevention or indeed in the same breath as the idea of a circular economy bill. I also fail to see how the circular economy bill can be serious if it does not seek to address the disaster of municipal waste management. And just to return to it again, the privatisation of municipal waste has been a disaster. A disaster for workers, for the environment, for the householders and I would ultimately argue for the local authorities themselves, who like I said are picking up the pieces and picking up the tab for the private companies, all of whom are registered offshore by the way, and make vast profits while their costs to the ordinary household goes up and up and up and the flight tipping increases all the time. Lastly, I want to comment on what is heralded as a key element, which is the extra charge on disposable cups of between 20 cents and 1 euro. Again, it speaks to the common theme of how the Green Party in particular addresses environmental prices. As I say, a miniature version of the carbon tax, a policy based on the idea of changing the behaviour of people, but allowing multiple loopholes and get-out clauses for corporate and systemic products under certain circumstances. So we can keep manufacturing these things under certain circumstances, but we will charge people for using them. If we drown in a sea of plastic, if we choke all the species in the marine environment, we are dragging our feet on the banning of the manufacture of such damaging products. What timelines stretch to 2030 given the scale of the crisis now? I know we are to expect a deposit and return systems on bottles later in the year, but this should also be in the legislation. I believe, Minister, the mistaken belief here is that the environmental crisis can be tackled by neoliberal measures, which charge our behaviour out of existence, but only if it could happen, and only if it is aimed at individuals. Never aim it at business, at corporate entities that ultimately benefit from the production and the manufacturing involved. I learned a couple of things when I was in Palestine when I was about 18. One, I learned that Israel was an apartheid state, and that we need to do something about that. But while I was there, I was working in the desert, and we were growing tomatoes, and melons, all sorts. But one of the interesting things, and it has always stuck with me, is when the farmers were producing the tomatoes for the European export market, each morning we'd bring massive bags of chemicals and pour them into these big vats. Because they were being exported, you needed chemicals to keep them solid, so that they could be transported huge distances to Europe and would still look good at the other end. And then you had the nice tomatoes, beautiful tomatoes, where no chemicals went into them, which were produced for the local market. And they were absolutely gorgeous. They didn't look exactly the same as the ones you get when you go to the shelves here, but they were the tasty ones. And there was no chemicals in them at all. I should say, I learned something else. The rotten, the rotten melons, produced by this Israeli farm, were sent to Gaza. I learned that as well. But there's a very important lesson in that little experience, and it relates to the discussion myself and Breed had with farmers the other day, where they, and it's been highlighted by the Ukraine crisis, is we were feeding the world, and then we discovered actually when the Ukraine crisis comes, we're not actually feeding the world. We grow a lot of cows, and we export them, and we export a lot of dairy-related products, but actually we're not, possibly, we could be in danger of not being able to feed ourselves, or even be able to feed the cows, because we don't grow enough grain.