The country's first reverse vending machine will begin operating this afternoon in County Monaghan, aimed at encouraging people to recycle their plastic bottles.
It allows people to bring their bottles for recycling, and then gives out vouchers worth 10 cent.
The machine in Carrickmacross - located in the Market Square shopping centre - is programmed to recognise barcodes so there will not be an issue with non-recyclables getting mixed in.
Breda McGuigan is treasurer of the local tidy towns initiative, and she explained that the new machine allows people to return their clean and empty plastic bottles.
She told Newstalk Breakfast: "It will hold a couple of hundreds bottles, depending on the size. We're going to empty it every day.
"For the first while, we'll be keeping a very close eye on it - to make sure it doesn't get full. We'll have somebody checking it... at least once or twice a day."
She added: "[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."
She added that the machine can 'learn' the sizes of bottles it doesn't recognise - meaning the software can then be upgraded so the machine accepts those bottles in the future.
