The shine appears to have officially worn off the Government’s Deposit Return Scheme, with one Senator this week demanding that Minister for the Environment Darragh O’Brien be hauled before Irish politicians to explain why a mega almosf 90% of the plastics collected are shipped abroad to be recycled.

Eco warriors up and down the country celebrated when the scheme was introduced under Leo Varadkar’s government in February 2024. There were even hopes that the change to our recycling laws would help redeem Varadkar’s tumultuous term as Taoiseach. The scheme, where you can visit your local supermarket and see your stash of empty plastic bottles and cans crushed down by a machine, which then churns out a voucher in return for the goods, was aimed at boosting recycling rates and reducing street litter.

While some have enjoyed the scavenger hunt aspect to the whole thing, the scheme has been hit with various criticisms. Consumers have rightly complained that after gathering up a large stash of bottles and cans in order to get a voucher worth a couple of euros, they’ve found machines out of order and broken, pushing their patience to the limit. Others have found the scheme confusing, finding that certain recyclable materials are not eligible (for example, milk cartons and jam jars).

While the routine of collecting up empty bottles to be rewarded with a voucher was a novelty for some at the beginning, it’s grown a little cumbersome. Hauling weeks worth of plastic to your local shop to find the machine broken had left people wondering why they should bother. If the Government wants to do something, why can’t they make sure it’s done right?

Aside from all of that, it’s now a full-blown recycling disaster.Take Senator Sharon Keogan’s pointed comments a couple of days ago in the Seanad, where she slammed the whole thing as akin to a “double tax” on Irish consumers.

Senator Keogan, addressing the controversy this week, told the Seanad: “I call for a debate with the Minister for the environment, Deputy O’Brien, to come in to talk to us about the big problems we are seeing with the return scheme.”

“It turns out that 90% of the plastics collected have been shipped overseas because it is just not worth processing them here. In 2024, it is estimated that we sold 1.7 billion cans and bottles, but only about 900 million have been returned.

“That leaves 800 million cans not returned, but they still get a 20 cent per can or bottle bonus on their year-end balance sheets. This feels like another sneaky tax, since the return scheme pockets all the money from the cans and bottles that do not get returned.”

She is indeed spot on when she says that the Minister is needed to explain why all of the plastics fed into these machines cannot be recycled here in Ireland. How is it environmentally friendly to ship them halfway across the world? Increasingly, the green agenda which has driven so many of us demented appears to be more about posturing and virtue signalling. And less about genuine, sensible outcomes.

What are all the extra profits from the return scheme going to be used for? The icing on the cake, as Keogan notes, is the fact we, the taxpayers, are already paying for recycling bins. So it’s not unreasonable to liken it to a double tax.

The whole thing now borders on being environmentally ludicrous. We were never told that tonnes of plastic would be needlessly shipped out of Ireland. It’s also baffling because there are Irish companies which can recycle the plastic here. Deputy Matt Carthy of Sinn Fein pointed to one such company while addressing the Re-Turn storm in the Dáil last week — pointing to the Donegal company Shabra Plastics and Packaging. This would create local employment and contribute to our own economy – while also being much more environmentally sound.

The TD did well in highlighting the sheer ridiculousness of the whole thing. By next month, 17,000 tonnes of plastic will have been collected under the scheme, yet only 3,400 tonnes of it will have been recycled in the State. Do the maths, and this means that a ginormous 88% of the plastic collected under what has been hyped up as an environmental scheme is actually being shipped to locations worldwide.

HARRIS RESPONSE

In response to Deputy Carthy, Minister Simon Harris said that the figures did “seem quite extraordinary in terms of the amount of plastic being collected under the scheme” that then has to be shipped out of the country. However, he went on: “I do not profess to be an expert on the detail of this but I will ask the Minister for the environment to look at the specific issue raised by Deputy Carthy to see whether we can do more to build up capacity in this country.”

It’s hard at this point not to argue that the scheme has been a cod — a profit making exercise from the start, with inefficient machines which have done little but burden staff and customers. As Keogan said this week, we already have recycling bins which we pay for with our taxes. The Government doesn’t seem to care where the materials are actually recycled, and the emissions footprint from flying them across the globe, because this is more about bureaucratic box ticking than anything else.

Why wasn’t there any kind of low-cost public awareness campaign encouraging people to use their green bins if this was such a problem to begin with? Surely that would have been a better incentive before launching in to such an expensive scheme. The killer blow for the whole thing is that this environmental scheme has actually ended up being worse for the environment. Only in Ireland, eh?