Horizons

A heritage & habitat roundup

Reduce, reuse, recycle at work

Recycling in the workplace is the theme of this year’s Recycling Week, which begins on Monday. As recycling at home continues to grow, recycling at work can often be haphazard, with paper cups, lunch wrappings and other paper waste mixed together in waste paper bins. Overall in Ireland we recycle 65 per cent of packaging, which ranks us eighth among 27 EU countries, but we’ve a long way to go as far as office waste goes. Next week recycling locations will be launched on satnav maps. There will also be free electrical and battery recycling days throughout the country. See recyclemore.ie.

How trees have helped to shape our knowledge

Trees in Ancient Irelandis a free talk by Conor Newman, who as well as teaching archaeology at NUI Galway is chairman of the Heritage Council. He'll talk about the symbolic properties conferred on trees in ancient times. Ogham, for example – the first Irish alphabet – was shaped by knowledge of trees. It's on Thursday at 8pm in the agriculture and food science building at University College Dublin. Thursday is National Tree Day, whose theme this year is the birch tree. The Tree Council provides classroom materials for primary schools and organises woodland walks in more than 120 locations on the day. See treecouncil.ie.

Does size matter? It’s your chance to decide

You can check out the new Aviva Stadium in Dublin while debating the merits of good public and private architecture at the Irish TimesOpen Debate – Does Size Matter? – next Thursday at 7pm. John Bowman will chair the discussion with Irish TimesEnvironment Editor Frank McDonald, architect Shih-Fu Peng and urban planner Pauline Byrne, among others. The event is part of this year's Open House: a mixture of buildings will be open to the public from Thursday to Sunday. New this year are architectural walks, cycles and boat tours, as well as events in Galway. See architecturefoundation.ie/openhouse for full details.

ECOWEB:

coastwatch.org

If you’d like to join a survey of the coastline between now and October 14th, check out this site for details. Test kits to check water quality will allow the survey to link up to European results.