For the last decade Ireland has attained the European Union targets for recycling waste derived from packaging materials.
The Environmental Protection Agency statistics reveal that three years ago in 2005 sixty four per cent of packaging waste materials was recycled at a time when the target was just fifty per cent.
The Minister of State at the Environment Department, Tony Killeen, hailed the industry players and the citizens as well for their endeavours but also urged everyone not to rest on their laurels.
Calling the recycling of packaging materials the biggest success story in the environmental conservation efforts of Ireland, the Minister of State at the Environment Department reiterated that Ireland had surpassed recycling targets but that everyone should brace themselves for tougher targets that the European Union was planning to set. He was addressing a gathering in County Kildare during the 2008 Repak Service Providers Conference.
In the face of that, Tony Killeen added that attaining even higher goals would call for more effort from everyone in order to achieve even greater success than in the past. The minister further expressed confidence that it was achievable especially if everyone cooperated.
At the same gathering Dr Andrew Hetherington, the Chief Executive Officer of Repak, an organisation funded by the industry to boost the recycling of packaging materials, put a damper on the meeting when he revealed that the more ambitious targets that would be set would have to be achieved when many changes had taken place in the Irish society such as a rise in the population size, households getting smaller, the society increasingly becoming consumerist and excessive importation of packaging material into Ireland.
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