Like others, I’m very grateful to the Member for Ogmore for bringing forward this debate this afternoon. Presiding Officer, we remember the conversations and the debates we had about the 5p charge on a carrier bag. And, at the time, that was seen to be groundbreaking legislation. It led to a 71 per cent reduction in their usage, which had two impacts, of course: it changed public behaviour and it demonstrated the power of Government to change public behaviour and to drive change in the culture of behaviour. But, when we were doing that, of course, we thought we were groundbreaking, in the vanguard of environmental action at the time. But, since then, in the decade since those debates, we have seen how microplastics and plastics are not just disfiguring our environment, but poisoning our ecosystems. I remember hearing Sir David Attenborough saying that, wherever he goes now, wherever it is—be it in the mountains and moors or on the coast—there is discarded plastic everywhere. And he says about the UK Government:

‘The government hasn’t a clue, by the time they act it will be too late.’

And that’s a standing rebuke for Governments across the world. We’ve seen that Greenpeace has found that even the remotest parts of Antarctica are now contaminated with microplastics, not only ruining one of the most pristine environments on the planet, but those tiny shards of plastic, less than a twentieth of a millimetre wide, quite often, are mistaken for prey by tiny marine animals. The microplastics make their way up the food chain, potentially inflicting harm on larger animals, such as seabirds and whales, as well as getting into our own food chain via shellfish. In this way, we have reached a crisis point. We need now to see Government action again and Government taking the lead.

I believe we produce more waste in the United Kingdom than we actually understand. We’ve seen studies that say we produce 50 per cent more plastic waste than projected. And we in Wales, quite rightly, champion high recycling rates, but I want to be clear, and I believe that our responsibility for the waste we create goes far beyond local recycling centres.

We have seen already how waste from Wales has ended up in the pacific ocean. It is completely unacceptable that we allow any waste at all from this country to pollute our seas and oceans, and unacceptable that we dump our waste on the poorest people on the planet. We should not be doing that. I believe that we need to take action and I believe that the Welsh Government needs to take action as well. We've seen popular demands, growing demands, from across the globe for action, and growing demands in Wales—a popular demand for change. I've seen, and I spoke earlier of, how the Welsh Government was able to drive behavioural change, but we're also seeing how change is being driven by people understanding the impact of our behaviour on the planet. How many of us can forget the image of a turtle wrapped in a plastic sack, or the photo of the stork wrapped in a plastic bag? The BBC brought us those images. If we do not use our power to legislate, then these images will keep coming back, but then it is us who will be guilty for allowing that to happen.