Irish Garden Designer Peter Donegan is helping launch this year’s Repak Recycling Week with a window display in Dunnes Stores on Georges Street, Dublin. The week long awareness campaign takes from the 12th-18th of October and features a series of initiatives to get the Irish public recycling better than ever.
The window display titled “Green House Effect” shows how recycling can impact on the environment and features a full size glass house with polystyrene flowers and trees, along with packaging elements that are traditionally not fully recycled. This focus of this year’s campaign “Recycle More – Recycle Better” is designed to educate people about the need to recycle from more rooms in the house and to properly clean out their recyclables. In addition materials that are not cleaned out could contaminate other recyclables making them difficult and more costly to recycle. Finally over 30% of a recycling/green bin’s capacity is being lost by people not squashing and compressing their recycling material.
This year the organization is hoping to reach a target of 18,000 tonnes of domestic used packaging for recycling or 1.6 million green bins over the month of October. This equates to a request that every household with green bins recycles on average 1.5 green bins or:
• 10 glass bottles
• 34 plastic bottles
• 5 beverage cartons and the equivalent of 63 cereal boxes
• 7 steel food cans and 9 aluminum cans
Dr. Andrew Hetherington, CEO Repak commenting on this campaign said “Ireland has done tremendously well in packaging recycling to date. Small changes in what and how people recycle can now make a big difference. Over 20,000 tonnes of waste put into green bins annually should not be there ranging from clothes to garden waste. The key to continuing the momentum of successful recycling in Ireland is the quality of materials. The higher grade the recyclables coupled with digging deeper into the household bin will help Ireland achieve higher packaging recycling targets.”
Over the course of the week Repak will also:
• Launch a new consumer focused website http://www.recyclemore.ie featuring multimedia and social media photos, videos, hints, tricks, posters, blog posts and tips for recycling in the Home, Office and School.
• Distribute posters and leaflets detailing common packaging items (often forgotten) that can be recycled to local libraries and colleges running recycling events.
• Produced and distribute leaflets in conjunction with Local Authorities and private contractors to educate people on how to recycle more and recycle better through their existing green bins.
• Feature new videos, pictures, competitions on Bebo, Facebook, YouTube, Pix.ie and updates on Twitter.
• Launch of “Recycling Moments” photo competition. Public invited to email colourful photos showing recycling to laura.byrne@repak.ie. Photos will be uploaded to http://pix.ie/repak and winners announced on www.recyclemore.ie.
• Announce the winners of the 8th Annual Repak Awards which takes place on Thursday the 15th of October in Croke Park, Dublin. The lunchtime awards recognise the efforts and ingenuity of its Industry Members, Local Authorities and Collectors in the area of packaging prevention, reuse and recycling.
• Major radio and on line advertising awareness campaign.
• Organise schools colouring competition and class activity program for the week.
The “Green House Effect” display features a full size glass house with specific items of packaging to highlight their recyclability. The material includes plastic wrap, aluminum take away trays, pizza boxes and steel food cans.
Dunnes Stores are long standing members of Repak contributing towards the recovery and recycling of the packaging they supply to their customers. Through participating members, Repak last year raised €29.5 million in Packaging levies to support packaging recycling in Ireland. The total amount recovered/recycled in 2008 was 713,000 tonnes up 9.5% from the previous year.
