Over the next seven days, Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) and One Step Closer will run a survey on where the College’s next water fountains should be located.
The proposed locations for the new fountains are the Berkeley, the Hamilton, the Arts Block, the Sports Hall, Goldsmith Hall or the O’Reilly Institute.
The introduction of this survey follows a similar one run by TCDSU earlier in the year to decide what sustainable products the union’s shop should stock. Following that survey, bamboo toothbrushes were added to the shops.
In 2017, TCD Plastic Solutions found that at least 2,000 plastic bottles were bought on campus daily and another 2,000 to 3,000 were bought off campus and subsequently brought into Trinity.
It is hoped that this campaign will further encourage students to use reusable water bottles. Plastic bottles can take over 450 years to decompose, meaning that its effects are felt for generations.
In a press statement, Trinity’s Sustainability Advisor to Trinity Michele Hallahan said that the goal of the campaign “is to encourage more of our campus community to refill a bottle, rather than buying more plastic”.
“By boosting people’s awareness of the issue, and providing access to refill stations we hope to reduce our collective campus plastic footprint by about 50,000 each year”, she said.
Joanna Mulkeen, the CEO of voting platform One Step Closer, said in a press statement that “voting for new water fountains and changing refilling habits, might feel like small steps but they will make a big impact considering that Trinity’s total number of staff and students is close to 20,000 people. Every step matters”.
“Our dream is to inspire and empower a new type of change making. Students and staff can through these campaigns influence TCD to allocate resources to projects for good. And in doing so, having a smaller environmental footprint will only get easier”, she explained.
In February of this year, TCD Plastic Solutions launched a cup deposit scheme with the Pav. Under the scheme, the Pav bought re-usable cups that can be washed and kept in circulation. Customers pay a small deposit to use the cup which is then returned to them when they return the cup.
In October of last year, Provost Patrick Prendergast tweeted his support for the campaign to remove single plastics from campus. “I support [TCDSU] on reducing single use plastics in [Trinity]”, stated Prendergast.
