Real reason we are a nation of contamination

It’s easier for homes to recycle glass than plastic

I’M sick of plastic, and I’m baffled as to what goes into the green, brown and red bins in our home. Like many families, there is a daily tussle with pizza packaging and if there is a slice of pepperoni on the box, it can’t be recycled. Unless you clean, wash and dry every item in your green bin the whole load is deemed contaminated. Go on, try and reef the top of those pesky shampoo bottles, wash them out and dry them!

Yes, household bins are becoming more and more baffling to manage.

Did you know that a lot of plastic is simply not recyclable – ever. If, for example, you leave the hard top on a plastic bottle it can’t be recycled.

And the situation only gets worse and more perplexing.

Simply put, unless you feel comfortable emptying your green bin onto your living room floor, it won’t be any use for recycling!

Hard plastic can’t be recycled, and Ireland’s reckless record on plastic use has to be seen to be believed.

For every person in Ireland, we generated 61kg of plastic – that’s double the European average – which in itself is disgraceful.

Two things made me think again about plastic this week. Firstly, the misguided advertising campaign by the State quango Repak – called Team Green – which urges people to ‘recycle one more item of plastic every week’.

A laudable aim? But, wait, surely we should be calling on people to purchase one less plastic item every week!

Repak is funded by Irish businesses, big and small, who pay an annual levy to buy a sticker which they display on their premises – or face massive sanctions. Repak, by the way, don’t collect or recycle a single item of rubbish, so they have recruited a whole slew of celebrities and sports stars to encourage us to dispose of plastic wisely. A behavioural psychologist could argue that the whole campaign could backfire by suggesting that once you get rid of one more piece of plastic a week you are saving the planet. The Repak advert featuring the wonderful O’Donovan brothers highlights the difficulty in disposing of toxic plastic. Both are holding soft plastic bottles, but on closer examination you spot that the hard plastic bottle tops are missing because they simply cannot be recycled.

Repak should be encouraging companies – who are well represented on their board – to reduce their use of plastic. The public, already baffled by the rainbow of wheelie bins they have to manage each week, should be told to begin by replacing one plastic item a week with glass.

The second thing that made me think again about plastic was a visit recently to the incredible Encirc Glass manufacturing plant in Derrylin, Co. Fermanagh. This state-of-theart facility produces just under one billion glass bottles a year, and recycled glass makes 90% of every bottle they produce. The wonderful bottle banks peppered around our towns and cities – not run by Repak but by a super efficient company, Rehab Glassco – supply most of the recycled glass, or cullet, to the plant originally set up by businessman Séan Quinn.

Glass is endlessly recyclable; people are clear how to dispose of it, and on this island we are absolutely brilliant at it. Yes, by all means use well-loved celebs to support Team Green, but the slogan used by the O’Donovan brothers should instead read: ‘Use less plastic because glass is class, just like us!’