New recycling scheme takes biscuit

ANYONE who has ever taken part in a local litter clean-up knows wrappers for sweets, chocolate, biscuits, crisps and chips account for a large amount of the rubbish that blights the countryside.

Technology is advancing all the time and, in the future, we will see many ways of curbing waste and litter at source. At the same time, attempts are continuously being made to increase recycling and reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.

Indeed, one of the more notable culture changes in Ireland, in recent years, has been how well most people have taken to recycling and to the use of different types of bins for waste separation in their homes.

Granted, we have financial incentives for so doing but, once the habit is formed, we keep doing it and the environment benefits.

All of which is being taken a step further by a leading biscuit manufacturer which has come up with a new, environmentally-friendly scheme to save wrappers from landfill while raising money for charities.

United Biscuits, the manufacturer of McVitie’s, has teamed up with recycling experts TerraCycle to launch the McVitie’s Biscuit Wrapper Brigade. Believed to be an industry-first recycling fundraising scheme, it is open to every biscuit eater in Ireland.

In short, it offers an incentive to consumers to allow biscuit wrappers to be recycled in return for raising money for the charity of their choice.

Biscuit wrappers are recyclable, but very little mixed plastic recycling is carried out by local council kerbside collections, which results in millions of biscuit wrappers being sent to landfill.

But, this new scheme encourages consumers to help end this enormous waste of resources by sending in any brand of used biscuit wrappers to be recycled into everyday products such as watering cans, garden benches and waste bins.

The McVitie’s Biscuit Wrapper Brigade is open to consumers across Ireland who can get involved for free at www.terracycle.ie. Once registered, they can download pre-paid An Post postage labels allowing them to send in old wrappers. Each biscuit wrapper sent in can raise one cent for a charity.

Separately, we have news of what is claimed to be Ireland’s first compostable heavy-duty garden bag made by brothers Russell and Garrett Walsh under the GreenSax brand.

Home composting is on the rise, with an estimated 37,000 created here annually — an additional 64,000 tonnes of organic and garden waste going into brown bins.

The Walsh brothers tried to figure out a better and more environmentally-friendly way of collecting and transporting garden waste to a compost heap, brown bin, or recycling centre.

And they also wanted some kind of container that would itself break down during the composting process. That’s how they came up with GreenSax, a compostable range of brown bin bags.

Made from natural materials, the sacks break down within days and, the Dublin-based brothers say, have no impact on the end product.

“With nothing available in the market and composting on the rise, we decided to develop our own.

“Luckily, we already have a green technology business and it was through this that we created the fully compostable garden sack,” said Russell Walsh.

Some of the advantages are that it helps with smells, stops the attraction of flies and rodents to the heap and benefits the environment, he added.

In spite of all the campaigns for recycling and composting during the past decade, or more, a large volume of waste that need not go to landfill is still being dumped in the old-fashioned way.

According to the EPA National Waste Report 2010, just over 30% of black bin waste is made up of organic and garden waste.

The hope is that the new sacks will help resolve this problem and remove vast tonnage from landfill.

Also, local authorities still involved in waste collection and disposal are going to be faced with tough challenges in the next few years, as EU laws become ever stricter.

Since July 2010, not more than 47% of waste being land filled can be organic waste and this will be reduced to 30%, next year.

So, as a matter or urgency, more organic waste will have to be composted.

Like many other things in life, such composting can start in the home.

Many people are already composting domestically, with obvious benefits for their gardens. But, there’s still a long way to go before such composting becomes commonplace.

Hope, once again, springs from the rising generation and many primary schools are engaged in composting, giving the children many valuable lessons for life.