3. Statement by the Deputy Minister for Housing and Local Government: Recycling and the Green Recovery

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:20 pm on 13 October 2020.

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Photo of Mick Antoniw Mick Antoniw Labour 4:20, 13 October 2020

Deputy Minister, can I firstly thank you for your statement? Can I thank you also for the fact that you will, in fact, be attending a single-use plastics session in Pontypridd online later this week, where you will also have the opportunity to meet not only with young people in the constituency, but also from the Friends of the Earth youth forum in Pontypridd, who we meet with regularly to talk about different options and schemes that there may be for recycling?

Can I also say—? You referred in your statement to how much progress we've made. I think we have to start from the point of view—and maybe it's a generational thing—of how far backwards we actually went after the 1950s and 1960s, because I as a child did a lot of recycling, picking up glass bottles from building sites, getting the 4p back on the bottles, taking them back to be recycled. And, of course, when you went into a shop, it would all be paper bags, it would be paper wrapping and so on. So, many of the things that we're talking about doing now are the things that we used to do, and we just have to reorientate much of our business and the way in which we do things to achieve that.

But can I say—one of my constituents has sent to me what is a really interesting deposit-return scheme that's being introduced in America? And that is that bottles, whether they be glass, whether they be plastic and so on, are barcoded. There is a levy on all those bottles, and the individual who purchases them pays a slight premium on them, but, when they've finished with them, they take them to one of these big recycling bins, they post them through, the barcode is read, and they get their money back on them. Now, this is a rather more sophisticated adult version of what we used to do when I was a kid and collected these bottles. But it seems to me that there are systems and technologies in place that can really actually deliver a lot of this, and it seems to me pilots of technology like this in an area with perhaps a number of supermarkets and so on would really be a way of kicking off recycling, as a pilot, without the need for complex legislation. I wonder if that's something you'd be interested in looking at. Thank you.