Waste management company Greenstar has opened a new Euro 20m recycling facility in Bray, County Wicklow. The site will divert 135,000 tonnes from landfill every year and features an automated dry mix recyclables line to automatically separate aluminium and steel cans, paper, cardboard and plastics. Greenstar says the facility will be able to process 25,000 tonnes of commercial and household waste a year.

Civic bodies in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region could soon start sharing landfill sites to create environment friendly dumping grounds, thereby reducing the requirement of land for garbage. "Two to three civic bodies can possibly have a landfill site in common where they can dump their garbage, however the land will be only for bio-degradable waste," Metropolitan Commissioner Ratnakar Gaikwad said. The sites would be earmarked for certain civic bodies on the basis of their geographical proximity to the landfills.

Cutting across party lines, Sanguem residents on Friday joined hands to strongly oppose the acquisition of large tracts of fertile land in Uguem for the proposed garbage treatment plant of Curchorem Cacora Municipal Council (CCMC). Criticizing the notification for land acquisition process issued by Under Secretary Revenue Department D M Redkar for acquiring the land, Sanguem MLA Vassudev Meng Gaonkar argued that the land acquisition procedure was arbitrary and had no basis.

The Fatorda Block Congress Committee led by PCC general secretary Vijay Sardessai called on Chief Minister, Digambar Kamat and KTC Chairman Reginaldo Lourenco to unequivocally voice the opposition of the local Congress against any attempts to dump garbage for land filling near the KTC bus stand.

Mayor Gavin Newsom is competitive about many things, garbage included. When the city found out a few weeks ago that it was keeping 70 percent of its disposable waste out of local landfills, he embraced the statistic the way other mayors embrace winning sports teams, improved test scores or declining crime rates. Workers sort plastics at the San Francisco Recycling Center. The city, with 7,800 tons of waste a day, keeps 70 percent of it out of landfills. Mayor Gavin Newsom is shooting for 75 percent. But the city wants more.

Scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs are focusing on ways to help the environment. Some of our favorite ideas.

IN THE 1967 film The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman's character, Benjamin Braddock, receives a single word of advice about his future from a well-meaning friend of his parents: "Plastics." Our fearless, environment-saving duo of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Environment Minister Peter Garrett were 10 and 14 respectively when the film came out, and it seems plausible that they sucked this message in with their generational DNA but were too young to recognise its satirical intent.

The embarrassing rubbish mountain in Naples subsides

MCD officials today said the engineered sanitary landfill site, which the civic body is developing at Jaitpur, will be ready by December this year.