The armchairs and stools in the lobby of the Prague Congress Centre, where the fourth international Pro Europe Congress was held last month, were recycled out of fruit and vegetable packaging.
Although they were forming part of an exhibition of items - which also included a greenhouse, clothes and accessories made out of recycled material - they were being used by the congress participants, who found them pretty comfortable while sipping coffee and nibbling on snacks.
Held under the patronage of EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas, the congress discussed moving from waste generation to resource management. It was attended by more than 500 delegates including Mario Schembri, director of GreenPak, and Daniel Tabone, operations manager.
GreenPak is one of the 32 members making up Pro Europe, the umbrella organisation for European packaging and packaging waste recovery and recycling schemes. Established in 2004, GreenPak operates a compliance scheme to recover packaging waste in Malta and Gozo. It collects waste from warehouses and from consumers through recycling banks in the community.
The congress's main conclusion was that in spite of the expansion of waste policy to tackle the broader goals of sustainability and resource preservation, the concept of producer responsibility continues to play a key role in achieving a sustainable future.
According to Mr Schembri, this was, so far, not the situation in Malta where much stress is still being laid on taxation, rather than on producer responsibility.
"The mentality here still prevails that solutions lie in the imposition of taxation or deposit systems. The lessons coming out of Europe show that producer responsibility schemes, such as that operated by GreenPak, provide the best results."
He added that when the managing director of the European Organisation for Packaging and the Environment, Julian Carroll was recently asked to compare the benefits of producer responsibility with taxes or deposits, he replied that a shared producer responsibility scheme would always be better than government intervention by means of taxes or mandatory deposits.
He said that industry funded and industry organised schemes were always more efficient and more cost-effective than something run by a government.
Concluding the congress, Pro Europe general manager Joachim Quoden said that the role of producer responsibility schemes remained key even if the policy focus was shifting.
"Looking at the European Commission's increasing emphasis on sustainable consumption and production, for example, producer responsibility schemes within Pro Europe have not only substantially contributed to raising the environmental awareness and changing the behaviour of consumers throughout Europe, but have also supported industry in the process of reducing and optimising their packaging."
This has also been the case in Malta. Mr Schembri said that by building a better relationship with residents, GreenPak observed an improvement in the recovery rate from 18 per cent in 2006 to 30 per cent last year.
While GreenPak's members declared putting on the market 2,800 tonnes of packaging last year, by the end of that year, GreenPak recovered half the amount, surpassing national targets, as it had also done in the previous year.
However, when the local situation was discussed at a news conference during the congress, it was clear that the island still lagged behind other European states.
The government, aided by local councils, recently intensified its efforts by launching a door-to-door recyclable waste collection scheme.
But the government only intends to fund the collection for a short period of time following which it expects private funding to take over.
Mr Schembri argued that GreenPak was in a position to provide such funding and the company was currently in discussions with the Environment Ministry on how this could best be done.
"There are many ways how to collect segregated packaging waste. The system adopted by the ministry is one such example. GreenPak, with the help of other national systems operating in Europe, has looked and tested many techniques to see which performs best in practice and is economically viable in the Maltese context.
"The better collection methods are those that respect the diverse lifestyles of the Maltese society and which can be economically sustained over an indefinite period of time," he replied.
Mr Schembri pointed out that less packaging was not necessarily more environmentally friendly.
However, GreenPak completely supported viable waste reduction and the maximum possible reuse.
"Waste prevention and recovery is better than landfill," he said.
But the bulk of the waste produced here is still being dumped in landfills.