Since devolution, there has been an increase in our municipal recycling rate from 5 per cent to 64 per cent, which is phenomenal. It's driven by policy, but can I say, it's driven more by landfill tax, so it has put pressure on local authorities to ensure that they do recycle?

Recycling is, of course, only one of the three Rs to reduce waste into landfill. The others are 'reduce' and 'reuse' and I believe the other two are more important. Which is environmentally the better: use one plastic bottle 10 times or recycle 10 plastic bottles? The latter improves recycling rates. I would suggest that the former was environmentally much better, and I think that is an important point.

Those who create their own compost do not count against recycling, although, obviously, they're recycling and they're cutting down on the amount of energy used to move things to be recycled. I speak as someone who is very much in favour of not just a deposit-return scheme, but one where you actually reuse the bottles afterwards. Those of us from the Corona pop age group will be well aware of taking a bottle back and getting 5p or 10p—it worked. I think it is important that—. Plastic, too often, has no value, and that's why people are quite happy to throw it away. You wander around football grounds and other parks and you'll see plastic bottles being thrown because they're of no value. I think that we need a deposit-return scheme.

I also think that we ought to bring in some form of tax to level the playing field between glass and plastic. When I went to buy a bottle of vinegar a few weeks ago and it came in a plastic bottle, I was somewhere between amazed and surprised. The question is: should we be measuring recycling, or should we be measuring residual waste for incineration and landfill? Isn't that a better indication of how well we're doing? And would the Minister agree that that would be a better measure of environmental success, because otherwise we're penalising the reusers and we're penalising the reducers?