Scoil Mhuire TY students scoop environment innovators
Students from Scoil Mhuire, Trim were last week crowned National Champions of the pilot TY programme “Environmental Innovators.”
Environmental Innovators is a new Transition Year programme that presents the various challenges that our global food system faces - such as food waste, climate, biodiversity, and land use - and invites students to investigate innovative solutions that could be implemented in their school, home, local community or even across the globe.
Over 7,500 Transition Year students from 169 schools took part in the programme nationwide in the first year of its roll-out. Five top group finalists were chosen to attend the event and showcase their idea to a number of leading agri-food stakeholders, giving them the opportunity to meet like-minded peers and to demonstrate their learning over the course of the programme. They also got the chance to tour some of the labs in The O’Brien Centre for Science before the closing ceremony.
The topics covered in the finalists’ projects ranged from implementing proper waste disposal systems and promoting biodiversity in their schools, reusing plastic bale wrap to be recycled into insulating materials, and coming up with alternatives to reduce the tonnes of waste generated every year from the confectionary industry.
The pupils from Scoil Mhuire, Trim received top marks for their project based on recycling farm plastics as insulation for sheds and roofs, and as a result, they will receive a grand prize of €1,000. Rachel, Niamh, Grace and Leesha were inspired by the waste bale wrap they could see on farms and decided to tackle the issue head on and come up with a solution to benefit farmers and the environment.
Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine for Land Use and Biodiversity, Pippa Hackett was on hand to crown the winners and award them the €1000 prize. She commented “I am always fascinated to get a sense of what our students identify as the biggest challenges facing the agricultural sector, as well as their ideas about the potential solutions. I was particularly taken by the fact that 7,500 pupils participated in this initiative.”