Peter Donegan Landscaping Ltd has achieved the Bord Bia Quality Award.
The assessment for this award is through a stringently audited programme that was designed to raise standards within the landscape industry and increase customer confidence by rewarding companies who operate an awarded quality system through best practice and at the highest standards possible to this sector of the horticultural industry.
In 2009 the Landscape Quality Award had only been achieved by eight companies in Ireland. There are two award levels on both programmes; a Certificate of Merit (60% score) and the Quality Award (75% score). This is my third consecutive year to accept the Quality Award.
On winning the award Peter Donegan said:
I am delighted to win this award. I am now starting my 10th year in business and this now is recognition that a quality system is in place behind the scenes as well an already proven ability to design and landscape.
Repak Recycling Week launched with Dunnes Stores “Green House Effect” Installation. • Week theme is “Recycle More and Recycle Better”. • Repak target 18,000 tonnes of used packaging or 1.6 million green bin collections over the month of October. • New Recyclemore.ie Website launched. • 8th Annual Repak Recycling Awards take place Thursday 15th of October. • “Recycling Moments” Photo Competition Launched.
peter donegan & pippa o connor
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.”
peter donegan with pippa o'connor
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.
The key to ‘good’ small garden design is to make the most of your small space or to make it look as big as possible.
The first step in this is to eliminate symmetry ‘that can tell me how big your gardenis’ [by just looking at it from a window] and also to use the brightest colours possible to increase light movement and therefore enhance the feeling of space and movement around you.
Consider it a little like a bathroom [?!!] ie. a small space. The smaller the space the smaller the tile, the brighter the colour and also the brighter and airy it becomes!
The second step is to ensure that the distance between fixed features and/ or hard surfaces is that of a meandering nature ie. it takes ‘time’ to get there visually or they fade to the background so as not to take precedence over those things that give a sense of distance [ie. black/ dark].
...
Be careful not to want to cram too much into that space. I know you might not like white; or you want a water feature or decking and ‘I want and I want….. and can we not?’ – the answer is always ‘but of course!’ But if the question is how do I best spend my budget to get the maximum return [both monetary and aesthetically] then you may feel it a good idea to take an experienced garden designers advice. That said client is king! I always suggest that for my free advice I can always give you a full refund!!
At the end of the day – gardens should be fun and the process for both me as a designer and also for the client should be one not of stress but of excitement. I know I have spoke about costs before but generally speaking [in conversation with a fellow garden designer yesterday] one should allow about €100 per square metre not inclusive of ‘fancy stuff’.
Consider it a little like buying a car. Can you buy one for a five hundred euro ? would you?
Other information on garden design:
If it’s not on this list. You can leave a comment and ask or take a browse through the categories list [over there on your right].
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