ELECTION posters have been hanging on every lamppost in the country for weeks, but now they are about to be turned into sewer pipes and flower pots.

The posters, with their smiling faces of candidates and their election promises, will be cleaned, shredded and then melted down into recyclable plastic.

Leinster Environmentals, the Dundalk-based company behind the initiative, said it would take posters free of charge from politicians around the country.

“Anywhere else they go, they will have to pay to get rid of them. There’s no reason for any one to dump them or to throw them away,” sales manager James Loughran said.

The Green Party has already pledged to recycle its posters, and candidates from Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are also on board. And the Progressive Democrats, which used the slogan ‘Don’t Throw it All Away’, is surely a potential supplier of posters.

Mr Loughran said the parties now had a chance to live up to their campaign rhetoric about saving the environment.

“If they want to practise what they preach, all they have to do is get out and do it. It’s not going to cost them a penny. It’ll be interesting to see who stands up to be counted.”

The company, located off the M1 motorway between Belfast and Dublin, will take in the posters from local suppliers around the country. It aims to sell the recyclable material to companies in Ireland and Britain, which can use it to make such products as sewer pipes, crates and flower pots.

“If you can get a kilo of posters, you can blend it with one kilo of new material to make two kilos of flower pots,” Mr Loughran said.

Mr Loughran said the posters were “brilliant” to recycle – “clean and consistent.”

- Michael Brennan

source : www.independent.ie