From paper to plant food, the Roscrea way

Cistercian College Roscrea holds the unique distinction of taking more copies each day of The Irish Times than any other school in the State - 118 copies, at last count. Fairly impressive for a boarding school of barely 300 students.

However, 114 newspapers, six days a week, represents quite an accumulation of newsprint. Thus the school has developed a "green policy" to address the problem. Third-year students have contributed with a novel campaign to tackle waste paper.

An innovative approach from Class 317 has yielded a solution, while also giving birth to a useful newspaper recycling scheme.

The concept is simple. The execution is more difficult. The logistics of tracing 118 Irish Times every day are immense. This operation involves monitoring seemingly endless passages of rooms, gathering, sorting, bundling and storing the newspapers. More taxing even than the physical exertion is the mental agility required to challenge the existing mindset of littering or binning instead of recycling.

Those responsible for collecting the papers gain a useful insight into the material read by their peers. Sports Monday is particularly well regarded, it seems. Wednesday's Commercial Property and Friday's Business This Week 1 and 2 enjoy a more pared-down popularity. The main news sections stimulate an interest in current affairs for many. The television schedule is required reading for most. Some have made the simplex crossword a daily ritual.

The neatly-bound piles of print are sent in regular dispatches to Erin Horticulture, Birr, Co Offaly, for recycling. There they are put into large vats with water, dyes and wetting agents. The resultant porridge-like mixture is poured into moulds. The water is vacuumed out and the containers are then dried in an oven. The end product is horticultural peat pots - well designed and practical. Plants can be planted in the ground in these pots, which then decompose in the ground, nourishing the plant and leaving no harmful residues. All in all, a useful and happy ending for the life of newspaper sheets that might otherwise end up as litter or landfill.

A written project on the scheme will be compiled by each student and presented as part of the Junior Certificate CSPE exam.