Low-impact living by Jane Powers
Recycling isn't just good for the planet, it's good for the soul. There's nothing like unburdening yourself of a load of bottles and packaging at the bring bank, and then going home with a warm feeling of virtue. What's more, we're getting better and better at recycling: in 2005, householders kept 140,000 tonnes of stuff out of landfill by bringing it to be recycled or putting it out for kerbside collection. That figure was a 59 per cent increase on the previous year.
Well, that's the patting-ourselves-on-the-back side of the story. The other side is that we could be doing much better. Apparently, we still send two-thirds of our recyclable domestic waste to landfill. We could be composting more of our organic matter, and making more of an effort to keep paper, metals and textiles out of the dump. And, amazingly, 12 per cent of the weight of the contents of the average domestic bin is made up of plastic bottles.
Plastics can be confusing, so just to clarify: the most readily recycled are water and soft drinks bottles (made from polyethylene terephthalate or PET, and numbered 1 in the little triangular plastic recycling symbol) and shampoo, lotion and some cleaning fluid bottles (high density polyethylene or HDPE, numbered 2). However, most green bin services don't accept them, and nor do bottle banks. Keeping these plastics in the recycle loop requires extra effort, and usually means paying a visit to a recycling centre - which may involve a car, quite a bit of time, and not enough parking space when you get there.
Repak, Ireland's used packaging recycling scheme, is offering to make this journey a little more rewarding during its annual Recycling Week (October 2nd to 9th), by giving the first 1,000 people at each of Ireland's 90 recycling centres (see www.repak.ie for locations) free bags for storing and toting their recyclables. There's a competition, too, with a Ford Focus Flexifuel car and a year's supply of Maxol bio-ethanol as the prize. You need to bring your mobile phone, as entry is by text message. You might also bring your carless neighbours' and friends' phones too, because it's only fair that they should have a chance to participate (and make sure you bring their recyclables while you're at it).
I'll leave you with a statistic, provided by Repak: it seems that women are better recyclers than men. Now if that isn't a challenge to our better halves, I don't know what is.