I support this excellent proposal, and I think there are many other things we might consider doing as well. First, just to correct Simon, we are, I understand, the third best in the world for recycling, after Germany and Taiwan, so we need to celebrate that.

I was wondering whether we would have the competency, for example, to outlaw contracts that the supermarkets are making with some of their farming suppliers to force them to plough vegetables back into the land if they don’t meet the cosmetic appearances that consumers apparently demand in supermarkets, because that seems to me absolutely criminal.

I support your polystyrene tax, but I feel that there’s also more that we need to do to clarify for the citizen what plastics are recyclable and what are not, because I’ve had some debate with constituents about whether the black trays that are used invariably in processed foods—are they recyclable or not? If they’re not, let’s stop using them and use another coloured tray or one that’s made of a slightly different material, because it ought to be perfectly possible to recycle plastics if they’re not adulterated. Therefore, I think that the polystyrene tax should be extended to any plastics that are not recyclable, so that we force companies to recycle, because the cost in terms of the environment is just absolutely huge.

Most plastic packaging material is lost after one use—it’s not recycled. Once it becomes waste, it’s disposed of as municipal waste and about 30 per cent of it gets lost into the oceans, with the impact on Dai Lloyd’s friends but also on the ocean generally. We do face a situation where we could actually have more plastic in the ocean than fish, and that is a pretty scary prospect. So, I think that Europe is beginning to look at this, because, obviously, not all of Europe is doing as well as either Germany or Wales. The European Parliament has recently approved something called the Bonafè report, which is aimed at moving the EU towards a circular economy, with an 80 per cent recycling target for packaging waste. So, we want to be ahead of the curve in that respect, rather than following on.

So, I think that those are particularly good things that we could be doing, but I think it is also about changing behaviour, particularly the fact that a third of all food never actually reaches the table—that tells us that there’s something wrong about the way we respect food. But I think that we should also be thinking of following the excellent example of Germany with the closed substance cycle and waste management Act, which they passed in 1996, as you’ve already referred to, because it really does help to embed the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ concept, which we should all be following.