Forty per cent of the municipal waste managed in Ireland during 2011 was recycled, according to a new report released by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Monday. The rise of 2 percentage points since 2010 was the latest in a series of annual increases which have raised Ireland's recycling performance to the level of the EU27 average, said the EPA. Nevertheless, the Republic continued to rely heavily on landfilling, with just over half of its managed municipal waste consigned to landfill in 2011.
Energy recovery accounted for just 7 per cent of the 2.5 million tonnes of waste managed in the Republic in 2011. This put Ireland well below the EU average of 22 per cent of municipal waste undergoing energy recovery, but still marked a solid increase of 3 percentage points for Ireland, which saw the country's first municipal waste incinerator go online in autumn of 2011.