LIMERICK businesses and consumers are being encouraged to make use of their brown bins, recycle their food waste, and reduce their carbon footprint during National Food Waste Recycling Week.
National Food Waste Recycling Week runs from June 2 to June 9, and is hosted by MyWaste.ie, with the aim of raising awareness of food waste and recycling.
This comes as a new survey found that over two thirds of Irish households currently use a brown bin to recycle their food waste.
35 per cent of those surveyed said that helping climate change is their top motivation behind using a brown bin.
Pauline McDonogh, resource efficiency officer at MyWaste.ie, said that “we’ve made great progress in Ireland with over two thirds of people now using a brown bin, but as we see from the research, there is still a high proportion of food waste that could be recycled going into our general waste bins”.
“The introduction of new legislation in January this year for households and in July last year for businesses means everyone, everywhere in Ireland with a kerbside waste collection service is now entitled to a brown bin service. We’d urge everyone – consumers and businesses – if you don’t use a brown bin, please start, and make a positive change for our environment,” Ms McDonogh added.
It’s estimated that in Ireland, over 75,000 tonnes of food is wasted each year, equivalent to the weight of 7,000 blue whales.
Ms McDonogh concluded by saying that “we are also calling on businesses across Ireland to implement a sustainability strategy within their organisations and get a brown bin, to correctly recycle of food waste.
