Waste Management
Seanad Éireann — 2021-03-22
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Róisín Garvey (GP), Nominated by the Taoiseach

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire agus gabhaim buíochas leis as ucht an t-am a thabhairt don ábhar an-tábhachtach seo. I thank the Minister for his time on this important issue.
All plastics come from fossil fuels. To produce a plastic bottle takes the equivalent of filling one-quarter of the bottle with oil. It takes up to 500 years for plastic to disappear. Recycling just one tonne of plastic saves between 1,200 and 2,000 gallons of petroleum. Each year, Ireland produces 1 million tonnes of plastic waste. Approximately 30% of that waste is recycled. In Europe, the average is approximately 40% of plastic waste recycled. In Ireland, six disposable coffee cups are thrown away every second. Producing plastic products from recycled plastics reduces energy requirements by 66%. In Ireland, all soft plastic is going into landfill. The three "Rs" of reduce, reuse and recycle, which I have been advocating since the 1980s, may need a fourth - replace or remove. All solutions and alternatives are available but we need to make them the norm, not the alternative.
Some 220,000 plastic bottles are thrown away every day in Ireland. How can we make it as easy and simple as possible to address the challenges we face? How will we progress to a plastic-free society? That is what most people want in their hearts. While I commend the Minister on the Waste Action Plan for a Circular Economy, I want to see what steps we will take next.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2021-03-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:09+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-03-22