Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:08 pm on 19 March 2019.
First Minister, we can see plastics all around us. Just go out into the bay area and you can see plastic bottles floating in the corners of the bay. Despite much of the rhetoric in this institution and beyond, sadly, plastic pollution is a huge issue that we singularly seem to be failing at combating in any meaningful way at the moment.
We just had the cross-party group on forestry, over lunch time, resurrected recently. They highlighted the role that forestry can play in bringing alternative products forward instead of plastics, such as straws, for example. It is critical that the Welsh Government gets its act together on its targets for replantation, especially on the NRW estate. They are 6,000 hectares behind on their schedule. Can you commit the Welsh Government to redoubling its efforts in the forestry sector, so that those alternatives can be developed here in Wales, and the alternatives can then be offered to the public at large, so that they can reduce their plastic consumption? Because without those alternatives, we'll continue to be blighted by plastic pollution.