Ireland's first reverse vending machine is being officially unveiled in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan this afternoon.
It will allow people to recycle their plastic bottles, and receive a 10 cent voucher in return.
The machine, which can hold several hundred bottles at a time, uses a barcode scanner to recognise what is being recycled.
That ensures no non-recyclable items get mixed in with the bottles.
Collection of empties of a deposit bottle, PET bottle Return of deposit disposable beverage packaging | Picture by: FrankHoermann/SVEN SIMON/DPA/PA ImagesBreda McGuigan, treasurer of the local tidy towns committee, says the reverse vending machine technology has already proved successful in other countries.
She explained: "It will hold a couple of hundreds bottles, depending on the size. We're going to empty it every day.
"[The English manufacturer] has around 80,000 of these machines around the world, but this is the first one that will be operational in Ireland.
"We had to supply them with barcodes of all different types of plastic bottles that are on the market now in Ireland... they enter them into the computer system, so the machine already knows the size of a lot of bottles."
The machine can 'learn' the sizes of bottles it doesn't recognise.
While it will reject the unrecognised bottle at first, the software can then be upgraded so the machine accepts those bottles in the future.
