Cutting down on paper over elections

IN KEEPING with its environmental philosophy, the Green Party yesterday announced it would be keeping election campaign paper use down to the barest minimum.

The party also suggested measures that the Interior Ministry could implement to help keep the waste down.

Speaking at a news conference yesterday, party leader George Perdikis said that political parties went through some 1,000 tons of paper — worth around £2 million — during their campaigns.

“All this paper is put into peoples’ letter boxes creating a mess and adding more problems to an already overburdened rubbish collection system and overflowing dumps,” he said.

Perdikis said leaflets put out by candidates and their parties were often of no particular interest to the general public and that more modern means of communication such as the Internet, e-mail and the mass media, made traditional methods wasteful.

The Greens suggested that all the political parties join them in not handing out door-to-door material.

The party suggested the Interior Ministry should issue a single fact sheet on the positions of all the parties and provide contact numbers for voters interested in finding out more.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.