Charleville students impress MEPs and eurocrats with their carbon reduction project
AN award-winning bunch of enterprising boffins from the CBS Secondary School in Charleville have impressed MEP’s and eurocrats with their innovative plan to help reduce waste.
Earlier this year the team scooped top spot in the ‘Make Our World Greener’ challenge the prestigious Young Social Innovators ( YSI) 2017 competition with their thought-provoking ‘Ditch Your Carbon Cup Print’ project.
The project is targeted at reducing to reduce carbon emissions (CO2) in the locality by encouraging people use their own reusable cups when buying take-out beverages in garages and shops.
The idea is that this will substantially reduce the number of disposable cups sent to waste.
As well holding an awareness week in Charleville to highlight the issue, the team has also researching the availability of a collapsible cup that can be used in place of what many people regard as the inconvenient standard reusable cups.
Ireland South MEP Séan Kelly was so impressed with the project, he invited the team to Brussels to give fellow MEP’s and EU policy makers a valuable insight into the project.
They were received by a high-level delegation that included Karl-Heinz Florenz, a lead negotiator on the Waste Directive; sustainable product and green growth policy advisor Paulo De Sivla and Tara Connolly of Greenpeace.
During the meeting the students underlined the scale of the problem, pointing out their research found that more than 500 billion disposable cups are used globally each year. To out this figure into further perspective, 20 million trees are cut down and 12 billion gallons of water are used each year to make the cups.
For each cup produced a quarter-of-a-pound of CO2 is released into the atmosphere with a staggering four billion pounds of CO2 released during their shipping.
On average one million disposable cups are sent to landfill each minute and it takes three decades for each cup to break down.
Mr Kelly, himself a lead negotiator within the European Parliament on renewable energy, said the delegates were impressed with the level of work and detailed research that had gone into producing the project.
“They outlined their plan to reduce carbon cup print, which would in turn help to reduce deforestation, landfill, water waste and CO2 emissions,” said Mr Kelly.
“They put their case very well, and made it clear in no uncertain terms that with regard to climate change objectives, at the rate we are currently going carbon emissions will only be reduced by a mere 6% in Ireland by 2020,” he added.
To find out more about the project visit www.charlevillecbs.com/ditchyourcarboncupprint.