Unfortunately, there was a small turnout for the event, organised by the Student Demokristjani Maltin. The minister encouraged students and society at large to make the necessary commitment towards environmental welfare. Echoing a speech he had made recently, Mr Pullicino stressed that Malta needs to make the shift between a “gemgemi” grumbling society to an action society.

He made the point that if the 10,000 students attending the university helped foster environmental awareness with their families, it would make a huge difference.

Mr Pullicino said that so far, the university only recycled its waste paper, through an arrangement made some time ago.

He announced that the government will soon set up a corporate responsibility office that will coordinate its departments and organisations with regard to environmental issues.

The university will be integrated in this programme and will need to appoint, as will all ministries and later government departments, a “green leader” who will be responsible for assessing his or her organisation’s environmental friendliness and seeing that the necessary steps are taken to improve it. He encouraged students to lobby for one of their representatives to be appointed as green leader, returning to his argument that change must happen at grassroots level.

Many departments still do not collect their waste paper for recycling, he said, and this will have to change by the end of next year. As has been done by the Malta Environmental and Planning Authority, all ministries will have to carry out an energy audit and implement its recommendations to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings. By next year, each ministry will have to carry out an audit for at least one of the buildings for which it is responsible.

The minister also spoke of the government’s initiative to change its car fleet to clean vehicles. He said government had already bought some 20 electric cars for its departments and that Maltacom had purchased another 30. A number of departments have also switched to using bio-diesel instead of regular diesel.

Mr Pullicino also spoke about theses related to waste management that had been presented over the years and said that the work put into these dissertations should be exploited more. In fact, WasteServ had accessed these theses and had even made contact with the authors on some matters.

The government is to launch a campaign promoting the use of green bags instead of plastic bags, but he insisted that people had to commit themselves with the government over these changes. Concluding, he pointed out that recent BBC reports showed that Rwanda had banned the use of plastic bags, saying that whenever the government tried to implement such environmentally friendly measures, all hell broke loose.