How green is my campus

ALL IN A DAY'S WORK: Basil Boyce drives 20 miles to work in the morning - not very ecologically sound, he admits. By 8.30 a.m. he's troubleshooting on the grounds of UL, looking for vandalism, litter and environmental crises.

The students are pretty good about keeping the campus ship shape - as long as someone takes the lead. Boyce has been taking the lead for 23 years and believes that he has played his part in making UL the greenest university in Ireland.

In his quarter century as buildings superintendent, Boyce and his team have managed to bring the UL recycling tally to 50 per cent of the entire waste produced by the university. The campus is the size of Nenagh, so that's a lot of rubbish they're keeping out of landfill. Boyce spends his day keeping the finely-tuned machine that is his waste- management system running smoothly.

Three years ago, UL started compacting all cardboard and paper waste into bricks that provide free, smokeless fuel for open fires. The bricks were made available free to the public, staff and students, but no one would take it, says Boyce, not even the students. It took about a year for people to get over their suspicion of getting something for nothing. Now there's a rush to the compacter every day and every last brick is taken. Each month 20 tonnes of university cardboard finds its way from the campus to country fireplaces.

When the last carload of bricks has pulled out of the storeroom, he does a round of the recycle bins to make sure they are being used properly. He admits he'd never get the students to separate their waste into a dozen different bins, so he introduced Opti-bags last year. Now all recyclable material goes into one bin. he then sends the whole lot off campus to be sorted. All UL's waste glass, cardboard, paper, newspapers, plastic, batteries, cooking oil, metal and wood is recycled. Half of all rubbish produced in UL is kept out of landfill.

The campus stands on the banks of the Shannon, and Boyce admits to feeling a sense of responsibility to keep the campus clean in order to protect the river. The university runs an undergraduate programme in environmental science and uses the campus grounds to try out the academic principles put forward in the lecture halls.

In the afternoon Boyce works on some of the schemes he is hatching to push his 50 per cent recycling record even higher. Right now he's working on making the campus plastic bag free. Future projects include the provision of holding bins for scrap metal and wood, composting facilities for food waste and vegetation and holding areas for top soil and prunings.

In the late afternoon Boyce has a meeting with a student from the chemistry department to discuss new uses for food waste. The university restaurant serves 600 meals a day - that produces a lot of compostable residue. He has implemented a dehydration system which dries out the food waste, which is 85 per cent water. The water is not only removed, but purified so that it can be sent to the sewage plant. The 15 per cent of the residue left can be converted to compost in five weeks.

Boyce hopes that his expertise is still of use after he retires next year. For now, he'll go home to his recycled log fire and dream up ways to make sure that nothing, absolutely nothing, is wasted.

In an interview with Louise Holden