Episode 03

(Eco Eye s4/e3)

Environmental Education in Schools: Our environment is very important to us but especially for our children and their future. It affects all of us in our everyday lives, and our schools offer great opportunities to inform children and encourage actions that can improve our environment in our local communities. The Green Schools Programme is expanding rapidly in schools in Ireland with the help of inspiring teachers, An Taisce and backed up by environment officers from Local Authorities. We are now one of the highest, in numbers of schools, involved in this European FEE (Foundation for Environmental Education) programme. Many of our primary and secondary schools (up to Transition year) are now participating. We visit schools such as Cólaiste Bhríde in Carnew. We also look at the Senior Cycle where the Geography and Science leaving certificate courses have integrated environment into the syllabus. However there are a large number of schools in Ireland not actively promoting environment and there are lots of children going through our education system not taking subjects that focus on environment topics. There is much to be done at Government level to bring environment to the fore in education.

Improving Ireland’s Air Quality: Despite our economic boom, Ireland has seen in recent years, a considerable improvement in air quality. Remember the unhealthy winter smog in our cities and the poisoning effect of leaded petrol. These are now a thing of the past – and we take this for granted. Ireland has a geographic natural advantage, located in the Atlantic, benefiting from its westerly winds and much to our annoyance, being constantly cleansed by its rain. However this natural advantage is being rapidly eroded by our growing use of private cars and goods vehicles. This programme focuses on problems in our urban and traffic-congested areas, where particulate matter emissions (fine dust carrying toxic chemicals) needs urgent attention. We look at the health impacts of this growing problem and see what the EPA and Dublin City Council are doing to monitor this. We determine where the serious hotspots are and what urgent improvements we have to make for health reasons and to comply with the new European Directive.

Green Waste – From Home Garden to Processing Plant: We all enjoy our gardens and like DIY, gardening is an enjoyable and healthy hobby. However a lot of our hedge clippings, lawn mowings and weeds end up in our grey bins for landfill. This is a cost to householders and a waste of a valuable resource. We look at the advantages of home composting and an expert shows us how to compost – including raw vegetables and peelings from our kitchen. Compost is the natural fertiliser for our gardens and doesn’t contaminate our soil with toxic chemicals, it forms the natural cycle of replenishing our soil with what we’ve taken out in growing our plants. For those that don’t have time to compost we look at how this green waste can be delivered free to recycling centres around the country and how it’s processed in an environmental way into a valuable garden medium at Bord Na Mona’s green waste composting plant at Kilberry in Kildare. We follow the process and see how it’s environmentally managed and quality controlled. This reduces the cost of disposing in our grey bins, diverts from landfill and produces an important garden product.