Dirprwy Lywydd, it's my pleasure to give a minute of this short debate to, respectively, Joyce Watson, David Melding, Rhianon Passmore and Jenny Rathbone, which I think demonstrates the importance of this debate today.

If you lined up all the polystyrene foam cups made in just one day, they would encircle the earth. If you lined up all the plastic straws used in the UK every three days, they would circle the earth twice. Closer to home, if we home in on Wales, recent research by Professor Steve Ormerod of Cardiff University found plastics in 50 per cent of freshwater insects from rivers in south Wales. The demonstrates the intensity of the problem.

In 1950, the world's population of 2.5 billion produced 1.5 million tonnes of plastic. In 2016, a global population of more than 7 billion produced over 320 million tonnes of plastic, and this is set to double by 2034. Just as Huw Irranca-Davies was leaving the Chamber he said to me, 'You've got this debate today and do you realise you've got two plastic pens on your desk?' And I'm not afraid to embarrass Huw Irranca-Davies today by saying he's not here for the debate, but he embarrassed me by reminding me of that, and I've also got a whole load of plastic pens in my pocket as well.

We are addicted to plastic. Every day, approximately 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our oceans and there may be around 5.3 trillion macro and microplastic pieces floating in the open ocean weighing up to 269,000 tonnes. These are frightening statistics, and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles and 1 million sea birds are killed by marine plastic pollution annually. It is an environmental problem that is being caused by us today and our addiction to plastic. And we throw it away. Most families throw away around 40 kg of plastic per year, which could otherwise be recycled. Recycling just one plastic bottle saves enough energy to power a 60 W light bulb for six hours. Seventy-five per cent of post-consumer plastic waste is sent to landfill.

Our awareness of this problem has only relatively recently, I feel, come to attention. I was aware of it, but I only became aware of the depth of this issue and the dangers of this issue as a result of researching it for this debate. But Sir David Attenborough's Blue Planet II documentary was particularly credited in late 2017 with giving us a deeper insight into this, and hopefully spurring on Governments to take action in addition to the other environmental duties that they have, but also take action in relation, particularly, to plastic waste. As a result, last February the Scottish Government set out plans to ban plastic straws by the end of the year. Last April the UK Government announced it was considering a ban on single-use plastic products such as stirrers, straws and cotton wool buds. Think about the plastic you use. Think about the plastic you use every single day.

The Welsh Government has announced, and I'm sure the Deputy Minister's going to be raising it, plans to work with other parts of the UK on a deposit-return scheme and funding to help local authorities with plastic recycling and some other things that I'm going to come on to and ask the Welsh Government to consider. I've met with environmental campaigners and they've long argued about plastic waste and called for action, but it's still a huge issue and we have some way to go. Last July, the Welsh Government passed a new law banning shops in Wales from selling bathroom products containing plastic microbeads, for example, but these piecemeal actions need to be formed into a wider strategy.

I want to talk about Caerphilly and what's happening for a plastic-free Caerphilly. Two weeks ago 30 people—and this is one of the reasons why I chose this subject for the debate—attended a meeting of a group called Plastic-Free Caerphilly, which shows there is a growing enthusiasm for tackling plastic waste and making our local communities plastic free. Local residents, schools and business owners are working with Caerphilly County Borough Council, Friends of the Earth Caerphilly and a group called Surfers Against Sewage to get Caerphilly plastic-free status, and as part of my visit, my Small Business Saturday visit—one of my first ones when I was elected was to a business called Plant2Plate, and they sell healthy, sustainable packaged food, and they have taken major steps to being a plastic-free business in Caerphilly town. There's also The Vegan Box and The Old Library, which have made the same attempts in Caerphilly, and Transcend Packaging I've visited on Dyffryn Business Park. Transcend Packaging last June became one of only two companies in the whole of the UK to win a contract to provide paper straws to all McDonalds restaurants in the UK and Ireland. And I saw the factory in which they're doing it—it's walking distance from my house. Across the UK, we will see those paper straws going into McDonalds.