The reception area in Shabra Plastics in Castleblayney could well resemble Liverpool's trophy room from the team's glory days of the late 1970s and early 1980s given the number of awards the company and its founder, Rita Shah, have picked up in the past number of years.

Shah's clinching of the Ethnic Entrepreneur of the Year award comes on top of a host of other achievements - Monaghan Business Person of the Year, the O2 Businesswoman of the Year, Ibec Environmental Excellence Award, and short-listed for the Enrst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards a number of years ago.

Ms Shah described the latest award as a great honour and recognition of the contribution of the ethnic community to the economy.

"The fact that it is being honoured by the President and is recognised by the sponsors shows the country as a whole is believing in the ethnic community and the ethnic community is playing its part."

Winning seems to be a fact of life for the Kenyan-born Shah, whose grandparents originally hailed from India. Naturally enough Shah is delighted with the latest award, but like most successful sports squads, she knows that it is a team effort that gets the results.

"To win every award is an individual challenge in life and I take pride in them," she says.

"When you have your team behind you, you have your management team, you have every employee in the company there, it is not you, it is the team that is putting you on that pedestal. So I really owe it to the company," she says.

The company has been phenomenally successful since it was set up by Shah and fellow director Oliver Brady in Carrickmacross in 1986.

Brady had spent many years working for Shah's father in Kenya and was a close family friend. Originally from Ballybay, he decided to return home in the mid-1980s. With little idea of what he would do on his return, he was persuaded by the Shah family to open a plastics manufacturing facility using the knowledge he had gathered while working at other Shah manufacturing plants in East Africa. He was joined by Rita Shah and the the company name is an amalgamation of Shah and Brady.

To break into the Irish market for plastic bags, the two went to a landfill site, collected discarded bags and brought them home. From these samples, Shah was able to gauge the specification of bag that was required for the Irish market. They then approached the largest supplier of plastic bags in Ireland with a sample. A 20-tonne order was won and business was up and running.

The awards may be coming thick and fast today, but it hasn't always been plain sailing for the company. The company's success with plastic bags turned out to be its Achilles heel. When the then minister for the environment, Noel Dempsey, introduced the 15 cent plastic bag levy in 2002, it almost killed the company.

"When you lose a turnover of €4 million overnight you wonder what you are going to do tomorrow, what is going to happen to your staff," says Shah

A few days after the levy came into effect, Shah, who also finds time to own and train racehorses, had a horse running at Navan. The horse won by 10 lengths and, ironically, Dempsey as the local minister ended up handing Shah the prize.

"I told him I would rise to the challenge he was putting to us," she says. "It was a challenge but we were very positive. I had the team behind me and I wasn't going to accept no as an answer."

Until 1995, Shabra had bought recycled material from the UK. That year, it bought a 7-acre site in Castleblaney and built a plastics recycling plant. Shah and Brady decided to expand the company's recycling business and make new products.

It proved to be a turning point. Recycling was still in its infancy in Ireland but the company gained from its first-mover advantage.

"The Taoiseach when he came to acknowledge us last October said Shabra was 10 years ahead of the Government. The Government was only thinking about this and getting going now. We were already doing it."

Today, the company employs 55 people, turns over more than €8 million and handles about 15,000 tonnes of plastic a year. To replace the lost revenue from the decline of plastic shopping bags, Shabra now specialises in refuse sacks. It is now the main company in Ireland that collects plastic waste, sorts it into the various types, processes it and then manufactures some of the waste into various plastic products. It also sells the recycled material to other companies locally where it is made into carpets and fleeces.

Shabra's success may lend validity to the old saying of where there's muck, there's brass, but Shah says it's more than just making an easy profit from somebody else's rubbish. There would be little brass if you're handing back the same old muck.

"To get to the profit, you need a good management team and a quality product. Anybody can buy a machine and recycle. In our case we have designed our machines and tried and tested them and they have given us the output. If the quality is not going to be there, customers are not going to be able to make fibre out of it."

Shah and Brady are investing €2.7 million expanding the company to recycle plastic bottles at its new manufacturing, convertor and recycling base in Castleblayney.

"We have set up a plant where all this Irish waste that is exported is going to be reprocessed in Ireland. It will be an icon for Ireland and for Europe," she said.