I wish to extend my sympathy to the family of Brother Larry Timmons on his tragic death in Kenya.
The matter I raise is one that has gone unnoticed for quite a while. On 1 February 1996 the Minister for the Environment, Deputy Howlin, and IBEC announced amid a fanfare of celebration that REPAK was to be introduced. It was to take the responsibility for much of the work involved in collecting, recycling and reducing industrial and domestic waste from the Minister for the Environment. That fanfare has become nothing more than a whimper in the public mind and REPAK has faded from the memories of those in the industry involved in recycling.
The new company set objectives to collect waste from commercial outlets; to fund and extend the Kerbside operation to 50,000 houses; to fund and extend Rehab recycling operations and to set up a new household recycling system. It is a long time since that launch. The Minister has questions to answer and needs to take decisions on how he will implement the Waste Management Act, 1996.
On the same day, he pledged his full support for the development of REPAK and for its early "operationalisation", a marvellous example of beautiful rhetoric for which he is renowned. However, in terms of action we are left high and dry in many cases. Over the past ten years, waste generation has increased by 38 per cent and 92.1 per cent of waste collected still goes to land fill. The worst injustice is that some companies admit they generate waste and pay companies such as Kerbside the cost of recycling. Other companies flatly deny they play any part in generating waste.
This has continued because of the Minister's laissez-faire attitude to dealing with the crisis. It is ironic that some of the parent companies of the companies that claim they do not create waste here are prepared to pay in Germany and France for the cost of disposing of their waste through collection, recycling and waste reduction at source. The Minister should introduce strict regulations to off-load responsibility for waste management from the commercial sector.
The Joint Committee on Sustainable Development was told recently that waste contractors face an increase of approximately £14 in the cost of landfill. Others claim the increase will be even higher. As the economics of waste management is changing radically, the Minister must act quickly. Many aspects of waste management can be dealt with by regulation. Why is the Minister afraid to bite the bullet and introduce regulations? It is often said that politics is the art of the possible. When making sustainability a priority in policy making, politics should be the art of getting what is possible. As we are not yet at a sustainable juncture, the Minister must move quickly or matters will get worse.