The Environment Agency is now investigating exporters who've made false claims on thousands of tonnes of non-existent plastic waste, and a £50 million industry appears to have been penetrated by criminal gangs. Self-reporting invites fraud and error, and there's clearly inadequate oversight of what's happening to our waste. We simply cannot tolerate our rubbish being dumped on desperate developing countries, who don't have the technology to do anything useful with it. Instead, it's left to leak into rivers and oceans.

So, I would argue that the Welsh Government recycling targets for councils are unsustainable if they are based on fragile export markets. No doubt there's a market for aluminium, at £1,000 a tonne when I last looked at it, but other items are simply difficult to recycle—simply, there isn't a market for them. So, we need to move to a circular recycling system. Relying on recycling is masking unsustainable manufacturing practices, which the council tax payer is having to pick up the bill for. In terms of the three Rs—reduce, reuse and recycle—we need to put much more focus on reducing and reusing materials.

The landfill disposals tax will, I hope, tackle the unnecessary disposal of eminently reusable materials—particularly, the higher rate tax for unauthorised disposals should serve as a financial deterrent to illegal waste activity, which is particularly a feature of the construction industry, because those fly-tippers will be taxed twice over, and so they should be.

Of course, the construction industry is the UK's largest user of natural resources. As almost 90 per cent of construction waste is inert or non-hazardous, it can and should be reused, reclaimed and recycled. I would expect the landfill disposals tax to ensure that that will now happen. But, that, in turn, will make it even more difficult for local authorities to meet their recycling targets by weight, and that is why we need to look at a different strategy.

Legislation is needed to tackle the issue of packaging, particularly plastic packaging, that we generate, which is feeding the 8 million tonnes dumped into the ocean. In the Netherlands, for example, many goods are packaged in a clear plastic-like material that's made of starch and is biodegradable. German companies produce ready meals in biodegradable packages, whilst in Wales we already have universities producing packaging from recyclable material, but manufacturing industries are only using them in niche markets rather than adopting a systematic approach.

In Germany, the Closed Substance Cycle and Waste Management Act 1996, introduced 20 years ago, compels manufacturing companies to design wasteful packaging out of their processes. It has created a vibrant waste industry that is amongst the world leaders, and this is something that I think that we could be doing in Wales too.

We need to embed extended producer responsibility into all these packaging items, so that the manufacturers pay for what is currently being paid for by council tax payers. This extended producer responsibility would focus manufacturers on lifecycle thinking, making them have better access to secondary materials for their own supply chains, and also would have social benefits, like tackling litter, such as cigarette butts and chewing gum, that would save councils millions of pounds every year.

Of course, we do have some models of extended producer responsibility already, which is EU law, in things like electrical and electronic goods, batteries and cars. But, outside of the EU, Japan has taken EPR a lot further. It has extensive laws that cover the lifecycle of products from various industries, and requires manufacturers to use recycled materials and reusable parts in new products.

So, we could use the landfill disposals tax community scheme by providing grants to develop, for example, bottle-deposit schemes. Glass, of course, is 100 per cent recyclable and can be used again and again. That also can be applied to plastics, too, as they have done in Norway, where there's a deposit and return scheme in place that ensures that 97 per cent of all their containers are recycled. 

So, I hope that Members will consider this as an effective form of legislation.