Council to consider plastic bottle vending machine idea

The council has agreed to consider a proposal, from Green Party representative Louise Heavin, to pilot a reverse vending machine for the return of plastic bottles.

Cllr Heavin put forward a motion on the issue at this month's meeting of the Athlone Moate Municipal District.
She said a pilot project had been established at a SuperValu store in Carrackmacross, Monaghan, where people were given a voucher that could be used in the store in return for putting plastic bottles into the machine to be recycled.
A similar scheme had been in place at the Body and Soul festival in Westmeath, she said, and it had worked very well. She felt something similar should be established here, in conjunction with supermarkets and the local Tidy Towns organisations.
Her motion was unanimously supported by the other councillors, who said similar schemes had been proposed in the past by Mullingar councillor Emily Wallace and former Moate councillor Michael O'Brien.
"I think it's important that there would be a reward (for returning the bottles) because unfortunately, just the fact that something is good for the environment sometimes isn't enough," said Cllr John Dolan.
He also said there would be a need for assurances that such machines would be emptied regularly, as "there was an issue over Christmas where the recycling banks in the Fairgreen (in Athlone) weren't emptied."
Cllr Frankie Keena suggested that the next step might be to invite someone who was involved in the scheme in Carrickmacross to come to a meeting in Athlone and give a presentation about what's involved, and Cllr Heavin agreed with this.
However, council official Barry Kehoe said the local authority in Carrickmacross had been inundated with queries from other parts of the country since establishing the scheme there.
He understood that a seminar about the scheme is to be held in Carrickmacross later this month or in February, and that people from Athlone with an interest in the scheme could travel to that seminar in order to find out more.
Mr Kehoe said he had noticed a reverse vending machine in operation in a supermarket in Germany during a visit there last year.
"These machines are everywhere in Germany. Hopefully we'll get to that stage here in Ireland, but there's work to be done," he said.
He concluded that a national pilot project for the roll-out of such machines was likely, and that the council should possibly wait for that to happen rather than "devoting our own scarce resources into something that's going to happen, nationally, anyway."