Recently, I went onto our City Campus SU Instagram profile (follow us!), and posted an exposé on the state of recycling here.
The truth is, every time to separate your waste into each individual bin, it is a complete waste of your time. Every time your scrape your food into the compost bin, then put your tin fizzy drink into recycling, and your dirty food container in the bin, it is pointless.
At the end of the day, it all gets put into one massive bin bag and brought to landfill!
This brings many questions to our minds – why don’t they recycle whatever is in the recycling bin? Why are there separate bins in the first place? What are we doing wrong that it’s all going to landfill? Why is there no efforts being made to change this?
Do TU Dublin not care that the world is on fire?!?!
The lack of waste separation in the City Campus is part of a larger issue on the lack of climate action initiative TU Dublin are taking, even though we are faced with the largest issue of our lifetimes, and time is running out to fix things.
Funding for green campus initiatives is quite low, and the green campus “office” is run by a one-man show – Andy Maguire. He can’t all of this on his own, but neither can students. All we can do is work together, and make sure TU Dublin know we take this shit seriously, and we want serious change to take place on our campus.
Ideas being floated by students include:
Plastic Free Campus
Single-use plastics are a major source of pollution, so why is the college still giving them out? Our catering contractors shouldn’t be giving single-use materials, when we all know as soon as we bin them they go into landfill. UCC and DCU are making loads of changes in this area, and we should be too.
Climate Change on the Curriculum
Climate Change is affecting all of us, and yet, none of us know what to do about it. We can have more sustainably-focused modules in our programmes, so we can deal with the issues ourselves.
Divest from Fossil Fuels
A huge initiative from Trinity – the students discovered that heaps of money were being spent on fossil fuel industries, a key source of pollution of our planet. I wonder how much TU Dublin spends per year on them?
Lobbying Power
TU Dublin is the largest University in the Country – what are management doing to ensure the planet is a safer place for its students? It has a major political force, and it isn’t being harnessed.
So what can be done? These are big tasks to be worked on, and the University may say it’s impossible, but I’m not going down without a fight. The SU have set up a Climate Action Working Group, to focus the energy of our students, and get to work on putting pressure on our college to make some changes. We have a voice, so let’s use it!
If you’re interested in joining the working group – get in touch. Email deputy.cc@tudublinsu.ie , and you’ll be added to a mailing list.
