top of page

Sustainability Projects

In July 2023 Milltownpass Tidy Towns unveiled a new bottle cap mural in the centre of the village as a means to highlight the volume of single-use plastics in circulation and their impact on the environment. Read on to learn about this and other exciting sustainability projects being undertaken.

Our committee and volunteers are heavily focused on Sustainability and have worked on a number of projects in this space over the past few years. We've highlighted a few of our more recent projects below.


Sustainability Mural


For the month of April 2023 we ran a plastic bottle caps drive and encouraged the community to collect their used bottle caps for us with the intention of creating a sustainability mural. We were amazed with the response from our small community – more than 10,000 caps were collected during the period and so we began the process of creating the mural. The colourful mural, designed by our youth officer Wayne Wright, depicts a mill wheel to acknowledge the local heritage as one of the first villages in Ireland to have its own electricity supply powered by the Milltown River, providing power to the village long before rural electrification.


The mural took about a month to complete and we enlisted the help of the local Scouts (9th Westmeath Scouts) and other volunteers to help sort the bottle caps into their respective colours and screw each individually in place. In early July 2023 we were ready to unveil the enormous 9000+ thoursand bottle cap mural in the centre of the village as a means to highlight the volume of single-use plastics in circulation and their impact on the environment.


Out of the 22 million plastic bottles purchased in Ireland each week, only 30% are recycled. The rest end up in landfill or in the ocean, creating untold harm to the planet. Our hope is that by working together as a community we can reduce our plastic usage and recycle where possible in order to do our bit for the planet.



Climate Heros Community Challenge


During the month of May 2023 we put forward a team 8 volunteers from Milltownpass who competed as part of Irelands first ever community climate challenge. The team logged small everyday changes they made to their routines in an effort to reduce our contribution to climate change. Together over a 2 week period we saved 937.8kg Co2, the equivalent of driving 2,616km by car! Not only that but we places 1st in Co. Westmeath and 16th nationally out of a total of 73 teams! There was a total saving by all competing teams of 36 tonnes Co2!


Competing in the challenge really gave us food for thought on how simple, small changes really do make a big difference towards climate change.



Sustainable Christmas Tree


To celebrate the festive period in 2021 we errected a giant real conifer tree in the center of the village. While it looked and smelled fantastic we were very aware of the environmental impact of cutting down a huge tree for the sole purpose of lighting it up for xmas and disgarding it a few weeks later. So for 2022 we vowed to do thinks differently albeit on a shoe sting budget! Our 2022 tree was the result of many local groups and businesses coming together to create something lasting that can be reused within the village for many years to come.The original steel structure was built by Cole Arc Engineering and extended to more than 21 feet high by our CE worker Christy Wright, with the support of Abby Gate Craft. Our Tidy Towns volunteers then spent weeks painting it and covering it with artificial conifer one fake branch at a time. The conifer we repurposed from cheap artificial fence panelling which we purchased online. We ended up with very gigantic and very beautiful fake christmas tree that can be used by the village for many years to come!



Sustainable Weed Membrane


In 2022 we had been having a problem with invasive scutch grass in the large flower bed on the Mullingar road so decided to use a novel and sustainable approach to creating a weed barrier. We pulled back the existing bark mulch and covered it with a layer waste cardboard and another layer of bark mulch to see if that would do the trick, and it did, the scutch grass is all but gone!! We have since used this approach on a number of other beds around the village. We still have a small amount of weeding to do in these beds but thats a small price to pay for the use of such a sustainable and environmentally friendly solution!


If you'd like to give it a go in your own garden then here are a couple of tips:

  • Do it during the summer while weeds and grass are growing well in order to block the sun and properly kill them off during their growth phase.

  • Overlap the cardboard by at least 6 inches to stop sunlight getting through.

  • If you've got a bit of an incline like we did lay the cardboard in such a way that the water can run between the boards rather than over the top of the boards (it's the opposite of how roof tiles are layered).

  • Soak the cardboard well with plenty of water.

  • Cover with a nice thick layer of bark mulch and the just wait and see!


Project Gallery

087 9386969

Milltownpass,

Co. Westmeath

Find us on Facebook: 

  • facebook

© 2023 by Milltownpass Tidy Towns.  Sponsored by the Rise Community Fund.

bottom of page