Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): As the Minister of Finance noted this is a Government which has a long-term eye on the wellbeing of New Zealanders. We care about people and planet and that's why we want to turn around New Zealand's rubbish record on waste.I'd like to share with the House part of a letter I received from nine-year-old Hugh of Te Puke. It highlights why what we're doing as a Government to tackle our waste issues is so important. Here's what Hugh said: I am worried about all the rubbish on our wonderful planet. I am worried that all the animals both on land and sea and the birds that fly are dying because there is a lot of plastic around where they live and they think it is food and eat it. When they eat plastic it can cause them to choke and die or get very sick. I do not want to see all animals die. Our family loves animals and except for pests we want to enjoy animals. The beach and our ocean are not places for rubbish." Hugh is right. There is too much rubbish and too much plastic ending up in our streams and in our oceans and going to landfill.So we are confronting our waste problem and with the Greens at the heart of Government we are making a difference. We are tackling an issue that past Governments particularly the National Government neglected for far too long. So in the two years since we've been in Government we have banned microplastics we have banned single-use plastic shopping bags we are designing a container return scheme for beverage bottles and cans and that will significantly increase the recovery of those beverage bottles and cans—the recovery of materials that they're made of like plastic and aluminium—and that will reduce litter and waste. We've set out the consultation and done the criteria for product stewardship schemes to deal with challenging products like e-waste like tyres and like batteries so that we design waste out of our system from the get go. We make the economy more efficient by recovering more materials creating jobs in the process.In response to China's ban on dealing with the world's waste we are redesigning with local councils kerbside recycling wanting to have a more consistent system and mapping our waste and reprocessing infrastructure across New Zealand. We've got a major plan to expand the landfill levy so that we get revenue to establish more resource recovery centres more reprocessing facilities in New Zealand for materials that would end up in landfill: construction and demolition materials metals plastics particularly the high-value plastics. And we've got a major initiative to get more data on waste to better understand where material flows. And of course we've got the $40 million from the Provincial Growth Fund which has been set aside to turn plastic and other waste into useful material for businesses and consumers.Last weekend the Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor Professor Juliet Gerrard released a fantastic report called Rethinking Plastics in Aotearoa New Zealand. I really want to thank Professor Gerrard and her team for the inspirational examples in this report and its recommendations on how we can really rethink plastic and redesign the systems. On Sunday the Prime Minister and I announced the Government's plan to respond to this report. We are building into our ambitious plan on waste many of the recommendations from this report. We want to shift away from low-value plastics hard-to-recycle plastics like polystyrene and PVC to using instead ones like HDPE and PET the 1 and 2 plastics. We want to phase out things like polystyrene meat trays and Styrofoam cups. We want to ensure that we can reprocess the materials that those things are currently made of. We want to phase out single-use plastic items like plastic cutlery—some of the issues around that and the fact that they end up in the oceans. We want to stimulate innovation and development in terms of soft plastics and we've got a lot of work under way with local government. We want to develop a labelling scheme for plastics and there's already work under way with industry on that.As Professor Gerrard says there is no silver bullet. We need a systems change. This Government has got an ambitious plan and we are getting on and doing it. Instead of the constant negativity that we have on that side of the House I'd encourage them to read this report—all of the inspiring examples of businesses communities councils and others getting on and thinking about how we can redesign our system how we can get rid of unnecessary waste going to landfill and how we can change the way we see plastics. Thank you."