Roche Denise: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5374. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): E Te Whare tēnā koe; tuarua ki ngā mema o tō tātou Whare tēnā koutou katoa; tuatoru mihi atu ki Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.[I greet you the House; secondly salutations to you all the members of our House; and thirdly I acknowledge Māori Language Week. Greetings to you and to us all.]I am addressing my comments to the Vote Environment budget. The revenue line shows that the waste disposal levy is expected to remain the same for the 2015-16 year as it did for the 2014-15 year. Currently that budget is $32 million.This revenue is the result of charging $10 on every tonne of waste that goes to landfill and I would just note that that is in the Waste Minimisation Act 2008 which was a member’s bill initiated by the Green Party that got cross-party support. That levy of $32 million is shared between local government and central government to fund waste minimisation activities and initiatives. Basically that is what it is used for.The Government’s Budget line shows that waste minimisation is not working—certainly not if it is going to keep the revenue level at the same amount as this year and last year—and I guess that is not really a surprise when you consider some of the schemes that the Government is funding. The classic example is the one that the Minister announced on the Saturday before last which was a voluntary product stewardship scheme from the packaging industry where it would set up collection points at supermarkets as a 3-year trial to collect single-use plastics and soft plastics including single-use plastic bags.The Government has allocated $1.2 million to do this for the 3-year trial but it is an example of “greenwashing” and nobody is fooled. One just has to look at the New Zealand Herald editorial on Saturday which basically explained why it is “greenwashing”. Again today in the Dominion Post we have the headline here “Plastic bag scheme won’t work” over an opinion piece from Massey University’s Dr Trisia Farrelly. It will not work because the scheme is an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff and it does not deal with the problem of single-use plastic bags in the environment. We use 1.6 billion of these single-use plastic bags every year. That generates about 6 to 11 tonnes of carbon per year and if we got rid of them it would be the same as taking about 3600 cars off the road permanently.Plastic bags are designed to be disposed of. Yes they do not make up a huge amount in the landfill but that is because they are incredibly lightweight and this is where they have a devastating impact on the environment. They can be ingested by marine animals—up to 2000 different marine species including whales and turtles are known to ingest plastic bags and die from them—and they break down into micro-plastic which is eaten by fish and then it enters the human food chain.This Government scheme does not work to change consumer behaviour so it does not minimise the amount of soft single-use plastic and it targets the same environmentally aware consumers who already take their reusable shopping bags to the supermarket in the first place. This is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff once we have failed to avoid refuse and reduce and then we have got into recycling but this is not going to fix it.Prevention is the way to go and for single-use plastic bags that would be done by introducing a disincentive to use them. We could join hundreds of countries and States across the world and phase them out entirely or we could introduce a point-of-sale levy. International evidence shows that having a levy reduces single-use plastic bag use by between 70 percent and 95 percent depending on how much is charged. Local government bodies really really support doing this. They voted on the Sunday before last to call on the Government to introduce a levy on single-use plastics because they are the ones that are cleaning up the waterways and cleaning up the drains that are getting blocked by this pest and this terrible product which is having a huge impact on our environment.