Earth Day at Symantec

Repak member, Symantec hosted an Earth Day exhibition for employees at their new offices in Ballycoolin on Wednesday 22nd April. The day was a great success. There were exhibitors from An Taisce, Junior Achievers Ireland, Bird Watching Ireland and, of course, Repak.

Symantec staff were really interested in all of the stands; there were lots of discussions, questions and feedback for all of the companies there. Symantec themselves had a stand asking employees to fill out environment questionnaires and ran a colouring competition for employees' children!

Repak gave out lots of flyers on recycling information and were able to answer direct recycling queries from staff.

Well done to Symantec for organising the day; it's clear that all of their environmental policies and initiatives are having a positive effect on employees and the environment!

Repak Easter Appeal

The sun was shining down on the PR launch on Good Friday for the annual Repak Easter Appeal. All the ingredients were there for a great photo shoot; sun, chocolate and a giant Easter Egg!

After all of the Easter festivities, Repak were urging consumers to make an extra effort to recycle any additional packaging. With 6.8 million Easter eggs consumed, that's a lot of packaging to get recycling! And it's just as well there's a mini marathon and a full marathon coming up because all of these Easter eggs will take us almost 2 million marathons to burn of all the calories!

The packaging on Easter eggs has really come a long way too. Manufacturers such as Cadbury's, Nestlé and Mars have gone to great lengths to reduce the cardboard and plastic on the Easter eggs. In some cases up to 30% less packaging is on the eggs. A lot of the packaging is 100% recyclable and can be accepted into your recycle bin at home.

If you do have any queries on what can go into your recycle bin you can contact the company that collects it. A list of contractors can be found here. You can also log onto www.recyclemore.ie to find handy hints and tips and to find out more about recycling.

Get cleaning with National Spring Clean

April is traditionally a month of spring cleaning and it's no different again this year with the launch of An Taisce's annual National Spring Clean. Now in it's 11th year NSC is Ireland's largest and most popular anti litter initiative.

Once again Repak are proud sponsors of the event, providing colour coded bags to all volunteers for the collection of recyclable cans and plastic bottles. Repak's involvement has really helped to increase the recycling rates of the litter collected; did you know that when NSC started recycling was practically non-existent? Now 35% of the waste collected is collected! That's good news for everyone involved!

You can register your own spring clean on the NSC website, contact them directly on 01 400 2219 for an information pack or email nsc@antaisce.org
Good luck with your spring cleaning!

It's TidyTowns Time Again!

What a success last year's TidyTowns was! There were over 700 entrants and the number of people involved reached the hundreds of thousands.
Repak is involved again this year sponsoring two awards; The Regional Award and the Best Presented Bring Bank Award.
The Regional Award is awarded to the top scoring entrant in each section, of which there are seven, and it attracts a prize of €2,000 to each winner.
The Best Presented Bring Bank Award is a special award to recognise community support in maintaining local bring bank sites and assisting in their general appearance and usage. A winner is awarded €1,000 in each of the seven regions and then a prize of another €1,000 is given to the best bring bank overall.
To enter the 2009 TidyTowns competition you can log onto the TidyTowns website, call the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government on 01 888 2300 or email tidytowns@environ.ie.
You can find out more about the Repak sponsored awards and download entry forms on the Repak website. So good luck again this year and maybe we'll see you at the awards!

Repak showcases its Schools Carbon Calculator at the successful An Taisce Green Schools Awards

Over the last two weeks, the Green Schools team at An Taisce and Repak have been travelling the country to award Green Flags to over 250 schools. I was there at the first flag ceremony in Galway and what a success it was. We had a morning and an afternoon session, awarding flags to schools in Galway City and County, Mayo, Roscommon and Leitrim. I met girls and boys receiving their first green flag from senior infant classes and older students from primary schools receiving their third green flag for the water programme.

I also attended the Dublin ceremonies in Croke Park. We used to joke that the Green Schools programme was getting so big that eventually we'd need somewhere the size of Croke Park to have the awards ceremony!! There are now over 3,100 schools in the programme and we needed two days at Croke Park to give out all the flags! What a busy two days it was too. We had schools from all over Leinster, travelling up early in the morning from places such as Wicklow and Monaghan to receive the prestigious green flag.

On the first day of the Croke Park events, Repak launched a Schools Carbon Calculator. Repak has been sponsoring Green Schools since 2008 and has committed €1 million to the programme to 2011. We designed the calculator specifically with the programme in mind to help schools achieve their goal and to get a good understanding of how they are doing on reducing their carbon footprint. With the calculator we were able to figure out that all the schools in the programme have helped to save over 7,000 tonnes of carbon emissions. Also, over 200 million litres of clean drinking water has been saved; enough to fill 85 Olympic sized pools. And if that wasn't enough 500,000 litres of petrol have been saved in the transport part of the programme; that's enough to keep a car going for 5 million kilometres!

To use the carbon calculator for your schools and to see how you're doing against the national average of all Irish schools you can access the Repak Green Schools Carbon Calculator on www.greenschoolsireland.org, or go to the Repak website; www.repak.ie. To find out more on how schools across the country are doing in the Green Schools Programme log onto the press release section of our website. Or if you want to check your own carbon footprint, follow the links to the Repak homepage to use our carbon calculator for homes

Recycling is the best environmental option

A report released by WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) in the UK claims that media reports suggesting that recycling adds to global warming are factually incorrect.
According to their reaearch 8.6 million tonnes of paper was recycled in the UK and abroad last year. This saved 11 million tonnes of CO2 emmissions, which is the equivalent of taking 3.6 million cars off the roads!
People who are concerned about the CO2 emmissions emitted when transporting the materials for recycling to China will be pleased to hear that selling the UK's used plastic bottles and paper actually saves carbon emissions. Shipping these materials more than 10,000 miles produces less CO2 than sending them to kandfill in the UK and using brand new materials.

Green Christmas 2008

Green Christmas 2008 was launched on the 23rd December 2008. The annual Repak campaign encourages consumers to recyle all the extra packaging produced over the Christmas period. We estimate that up to 79,800 tonnes of packaging is expected to be created including enough aluminium to run tinsel around the earth 123 times.

Repak also estimate Irish consumers alone will consume:
• 20.5 million wine bottles
• 5.5 million spirit bottles
• 49 million aluminium beer cans
• 25 million soft drinks cans
• 13.5 million beer bottles
• 40 million plastic drinks bottles
• 4.5 million cardboard sweet boxes
• 3 million cardboard toy boxes
• 4.5 million rolls of wrapping paper

So if you are short of a new years resolution why not make recycling your new year waste a goal for 2009!