7. Statement by the Minister for Environment: Extended Producer Responsibility

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:17 pm on 8 May 2018.

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Photo of Mick Antoniw Mick Antoniw Labour 6:17, 8 May 2018

I've two questions. Just a couple of comments before that: I think it's worth looking at where we've come from, and when we started, for example, with the plastic bags, the impact that had—almost 400 million bags a year in Wales alone not being utilised, 8 billion in the UK, which followed on from the Welsh example. I remember raising this at the Committee of the Regions in Brussels, because a whole series of countries in Europe were also thinking of following the example, which has resulted in, potentially, around 80 billion a year not being used. So, we mustn't underestimate the importance of the leading role that we play within Wales and the impact that can have, not just within our country, but within other countries as well.

Can I also just put on record how important it is to congratulate those councils who have been making so much progress, in particular my own council of Rhondda Cynon Taf, who've achieved now a 64 per cent recycling target, really leading the way, way ahead of Government targets, and continuing to do so?

Can I then also just refer to some of the matters you raise with regard to water, bottles, straws and so on, the Back to the Future items, which create an awful lot of nostalgia in my own mind? My misspent youth was spent hanging round building sites collecting those bottles for the returns of money, which normally went to finance five Park Drive in the local shop, I'm ashamed to say. The paper straws—I mean, I don't remember what a plastic straw was. We had paper straws that doubled up as peashooters, went with the school milk—they came with the school milk, which, of course, Maggie Thatcher then abolished; that was another matter. It was an anathema, and still is an anathema to many of us, the idea of not drinking tap water, or 'council pop', as we knew it, and it's still much better than the bottled stuff. I never understood that.

So, coming to the two questions, really, one is in terms of jobs. There's a tremendous opportunity here in terms of the transformation that is going to take place from the billions of straws that are used, the billions of paper cups and so on, and I wonder what, perhaps, we're doing to look at the business opportunities that exist around that.

The second one—you talked about culture change and, of course, education. Of course, in order to achieve that change, we have to educate the young people coming after us, the six, seven, eight, nine-year-olds. I can only then refer you perhaps to some of the fantastic educational information in terms of Tiki the Penguin, the kid's guide to the problems with plastic. I'm not going to put you totally on the spot now, but, apparently, if all the plastic humans make every year was weighed in elephants, how many elephants would you need? I don't expect an answer from you, but apparently it is 30 million, and, if you stood them in a line, they would go around the earth five times. That sort of educational information that's coming out I think is fantastic, because, to some extent, the actions we take now are for the generations that follow after us, and the work that's going in to actually change that whole culture within those generations, it just seems to me so important, and I think some of those imaginative ways of putting it over, of educating children now, are absolutely fantastic.