There was good news for the Minister of State for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Ossian Smyth, recently, as Friends of the Earth awarded him an ‘Excellent 8.5/10’ for his handling of Waste and Circular Economy.

The Friends of the Earth audit, which carries great weight in environmental circles, noted the introduction of the Deposit Return Scheme, which is operated by Re-turn and went live in February 2024.

To find out just how green and sustainable Ireland is, Hot Press invited Minister Smyth, who’s also the Green Party TD for Dún Laoghaire; Re-turn CEO Ciaran Foley; sustainability-minded musician Wallis Bird, and Jess Murphy, the proprietor of Kai in Galway which is Ireland’s only Michelin Green Star restaurant, to take part in the Climate Crisis: How Do We Turn The Tide? panel discussion in our Electric Picnic Chat Room.

It certainly captured the imagination of festivalgoers with a packed tent and plenty of audience participation.

In what was a lively and illuminating exchange of views, Smyth made it crystal clear what he’s looking to achieve before the next general election – whenever that may be.

Credit: Patrik Meier/hotpress.com

Let’s cut to the chase and find out how well – or otherwise – the Deposit Return Scheme is working.

“We’ve had four hundred million bottles and cans brought back, so it’s becoming a habit,” Minister Smyth reflected. “It really annoys people when you ask them to do something different but then it becomes sort of a natural thing – that’s what you expect to do when you go to the shops.”

Moving forward the minister wants to see “far less bottles and cans on the side of the road, on the beach or on the lakeshore. And if you walk along any grass verge in Ireland, you’ll find them thrown out of cars and so on. There’s hundreds of millions of them going into the countryside every year and that has to change.”

Smyth revealed that since the introduction of the Deposit Return Scheme, soft drink sales here have dropped by around 5% which one imagines will lessen the demand for cans and bottles.

HIGHER THAN EXPECTATIONS

Asked to deliver his first seven-months report, Re-turn’s Ciaran Foley was enthusiastic.

“It’s going really well,” he said. “It’s accelerated in the last couple of months, probably higher than our expectations. We have to get a certain quantity of one product, PET plastic, back so that we can build a recycling centre on the island. We thought we’d be able to look at that in year two, but thanks to the reaction from the Irish public it looks like the tonnage is there now. We’ve sought expressions of interest to see who’d like to build one for us and had five companies come back already, so we have to get on with the tender process now. Basically, we’ll have a full circular solution, where the manufacturers place the products on the Irish market, it all comes back to the one place here, we recycle it and then the manufacturers buy it off us again.”

A man who knows how to crunch numbers as well as PET plastics, Foley observed that, “There’s 1.8 billion bottles and cans placed on the market every year. So we have targets to get to 77% returned and recycled next year and 90% by 2029. For some reason, ourselves and Taiwan are the biggest users of the smaller on the go soft drinks bottles, so that’s another challenge. We’re already collaborating with 150 local clubs and scout groups and will be hitting schools big-time in September.

“I think it’s a heart and minds battle,” he continues. “It’s not just going to be the law that makes people do it. Ireland is a relatively affluent country, so 15 cents or 25 cents might not in itself be enough to persuade people to bring something back.”

We were then treated to some breaking news.

“You’re waiting to hear what I’m going to say, Ciaran!” Smyth joked. “I’m putting these giant machines, like washing machines, into county council recycling sites. You go up with a huge binbag full of bottles and cans, pour them in, press the button and it does them one after another really quickly.”

With first the plastic bag levy and now the Deposit Return Scheme paying clear dividends, what might be next?

“Maybe you’ll be able to bring disposable vapes back or coffee cups – we’re using four hundred million a year – and get some money,” said Minister Smyth. “There are other things we can add in later (to the Desposit Return Scheme).”

Re-turn at Electric Picnic 2024. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

What does he intend to do about single use vapes, which were banned at this year’s Electric Picnic?

“They’re on my getting rid of ‘to-do’ list – banning disposable vapes is coming up later in the year,” he stated. “We have an unbelievable 50 million vapes a year being sold in Ireland, most of which are ending up either in landfill or the landscape, and they contain electronics and lithium batteries. It’s just nuts when there are rechargeable ones.

“Also on my ‘to-do’ list is ‘best before’ dates on food because people are throwing out good food.”

Nodding her approval, Jess Murphy says: “People don’t know the difference between the best before and use by dates, which adds to food waste in a huge, huge way. I work with quite a lot of raw milk and young chefs think there’s something wrong with it when the cream floats to the top.

“It’s a really scary time we’re in,” she added, “because people don’t realise the seasons are changing fast. It’s like having blackberries ready now. That wasn’t the case twenty-two years ago when I started cooking in Ireland.”

Murphy went on to list some of the measures which have earned Kai its coveted Green Star.

“I have a contract with Walsh Waste & Recycling. I get my food waste weighed and then put it back into compost. We mulch and then it gets regenerated into the soil which goes back to our farmers.

“We have scales on our food waste pickup truck, so I get six monthly reports on how much food waste we’re producing. Doing bins is one of my fortes! You spend most of your time dry humping bins and measuring the oil in your wastewater system, which you don’t want going back into Galway Bay.”

Kai is also fighting the good fight on another front.

“A Green Star is great, but more important to me is seeing the second generation of refugees that I’ve been interviewing for the past ten years,” she reflected. “They’re all a part of our local community in Galway. I’d love to see more Green Stars but then I’d also love to see more amazing shawarma shops with doner kebabs made with beautiful Irish lamb. I’d love to see an Ethiopian restaurant and a Nigerian jollof joint open up.

“In Kai we have myself who’s a Kiwi. I have a guy from Afghanistan. I have a guy from India. I have a girl from El Salvador. We’re a United Nations of cooking and I can’t wait to see what they do with Irish food.”

Jess Murphy at Kai restaurant, Galway. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

Ossian Smyth is looking at what’s in your glass as well as on your plate.

“You drink beer?” he asked the Chat Room to rousing cheers. “In Germany, you have these reusable bottles which you bring back and they refill it, just like our old milk bottles. Generally having supermarkets that provide refills. We’re also putting a thousand drinking water fountains into Irish towns.”

GIGGING LESS & GIGGING BETTER

Like Jess Murphy, Wallis Bird has taken steps to make her life and work more sustainable.

“I live in Germany with my partner and two other couples who came together two years ago and bought a farmhouse an hour outside of Berlin,” she said. “We’ve dug our own well, put in heating and set it up as an artistic healing and creativity retreat. That’s our vibe.

“Music-wise, merch can be a really lucrative way to make money in the industry but there’s a lot of tat. I only make mine now to order using eco-friendly produce and textiles. Everything I own except for my underwear is second-hand.

“I feel great guilt when I’m gigging over my use of petrol – benzene, flying and stuff – so I gig less and I gig better,” Wallis continued. “People are doing candlelit shows or daylight shows, which uses less technology. There are so many things you can do like having no plastic in your backstage.”

Wallis Bird. Credit: Jens Oellermann

In April, the European Parliament voted by a massive majority of 584-3 to introduce Right To Repair legislation.

“One part of that, which has already been introduced, is that companies have to provide spare parts and instruction manuals,” Smyth explained. “Another part of Right To Repair, which will be coming in, is that batteries shouldn’t be glued in. They should be screwed in so they can be changed. We’re promoting the idea that the easiest and right thing to do is repair something rather than throwing it away and buying new.

“For example, if you’ve got a mobile phone and the screen cracks. We’re looking at doing what they do in France, which is subsidising half the cost of the repair in exchange for you not buying a new one. So a subsidy scheme for repairs in on the agenda.”

Asked by a Chat Room attendee about incentivising the use of electric cars, the Minister replied that, “There’s already €10,000 off the cost of a car if you buy electric rather than petrol. I think it should be focused on rural areas. Dún Laoghaire, where I live, proportionally has the highest number of electric cars in Ireland, yet we also have the DART and you can cycle everywhere. People who need it most should be the ones getting the larger grant. I’d like to see a scheme for, say, public health nurses or people who do vital services driving around the country. They should be the ones being subsidised for cars.”

Switching focus to activism, we asked the Minister what his reaction is to the sentences being handed out in the UK to Just Stop Oil protestors.

“Well, the sentences are really, really strict,” he proffered. “If you look at people being put in prison for five years for protesting about climate, versus shorter sentences for people who were involved in violent racist riots recently, that doesn’t add up. Maybe I shouldn’t be commenting on the British justice system, but it seems to be disproportionately long sentences.”

Would he support an Irish Just Stop Oil?

“When we go back to 2019, there were 10,000 young people on the streets in March and another 10,000 people came out in the autumn,” Smyth recalled. “Why I got elected was that there were strong feelings about climate change and then that seemed to ebb away with the pandemic. People began to think more about problems like mental health and so on. I would love to see climate activism coming back. I’m not doing it while I’m the Minister but, you know, I won’t be the Minister for long. After that I’ll be back out with placards. I won’t break the law but I will go out.”

Minister Ossian Smyth. Credit: Patrik Meier/hotpress.com

If Jess Murphy couldn’t drive from Galway to Dublin because the M6 was blocked by climate change protestors, would she be annoyed or go “well done, you!”

“Man, I’m a no nukes, 1980s Greenpeace girl,” she shot back. “I would absolutely support them.”

Echoing those sentiments, Wallis Bird said: “I’m pro-causing a fucking stir. The world is not supposed to be as convenient as it is. Whatever we want, we can have stuff delivered in the morning and I think that’s detrimental. We’ve seen the effect that’s had on the environment and also on us mentally. We just become selfish if we get everything we want.

“I’m pro-disturbance, absolutely,” she added. “There’s no problem in ruining a few beautiful pieces of art in order to have people find out that the Earth needs a lot more care than it’s being given. We need to chastise and monetarily impact companies that are ruining this beautiful, precious planet we have.”

Expanding on the theme, Ciaran Foley said: “We shared a lift home from the Picnic yesterday with Kellie Harrington. I was asking her, ‘Why are we so good at boxing?’ And she said, ‘The Irish just love a fight.’ So why not? If we’re talking about climate change, that has to be a good thing.”

A leaked Project 2025 policy document suggests that during a second presidency, Donald Trump would remove climate change references from all policy documents. Does that scare the proverbial out of Ossian Smyth?

“It’s the idea of Donald Trump being elected that scares me,” he replied. “This is a critical time. It’s 50/50 in the polls right now. I’m like, ‘If he does half the stuff he said he’s going to do, we’re in a lot of trouble.’ So I hope that doesn’t happen.

“Coming back to activism for a minute, the Minister reflected, “it doesn’t have to be holding protest placards or gluing yourself to a runway. Just do something with your community. Get together and clean up your local beach or roadside. Connect with people and connect with nature. So go out and do that.”