Ireland’s Waste Reduction Bill has been hitting the headlines this week, and it makes for some interesting media coverage and debates. The Bill includes a deposit and return scheme, and in general the Dail is in favour of the bill, but there is much debate on how much this will cost the tax payer for the benefit of increased recycling.

The bill includes a ban on single use coffee cups which seems to be wrecking coffee addicts heads. They don’t seem to be able to get their head around the fact that compostable coffee cups will quickly replace our current popular composite cardboard and plastic cups, and people will soon have a favourite reusable coffee cup that they won’t want to leave the house without. (The cute cup in our photograph is a fine example of an easily available reusable coffee cup).

The very fact that the Bill, brought to the Dail by Green Party and backed by Labour, has highlighted to many people how much their lifestyle is impacting on the environment, and just how much single use plastics we use daily for our beverages and food. This is not just coffee cups, plastic cutlery, plastic bottles for water and soda drinks, plastic cups for smoothies and juices, plastic beer cups at events, and much more. At the end of the year all this plastic adds up to a significant mountain of plastic that is not going to be used ever again. Labour Leader Brendan Howlin says just 40% of this plastic is recycled. Taking this into account it is easy to see why we absolutely need to do something about our modern disposable lifestyles. The 60% that is not recycled either ends up in landfill, or as litter by the side of the road, in rivers, or in the sea.

We don’t need to wait for the bill to come through to change this sad naritive of plastics. We can easily bring a water bottle with us instead of buying drinks in water bottles or plastic cups. We can bring a reusable coffee cup for our tea or coffee, and by doing so we might spark the conversation about reducing plastic consumption in our local coffee shops. We can request a water fountain in our workplaces and other public spaces to make refilling water bottles easy. By taking these steps ourselves and showing those around us how normal it can be, we can make reducing and reusing normal, and make single use plastics the abnormal.