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by David Emanuel Elcock | Laidlaw Scholar (2025) at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland for Localise Youth Volunteering at Claremont Avenue, Glasnevin, Dublin, D11 YNR2
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Please feel free to add suggestions and ideas to this workspace. If a project idea has been implemented, it could be useful to add a comment to the description highlighting experiences on the project such as previous team members, level of success and feasibility. An annual maintenance of this page could offer a good management approach to ensure fresh and creative ideas are kept whilst maintaining a good overview of previously successful projects and challenges to other projects.
We take inspiration from two places that could be adapted to local communities in Ireland:
To extend beyond a desk-based research project I’ll be travelling to Norway for two nights and photograph examples and speak with organisers of projects that could be applied to people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in Dublin. My hope is that we can apply projects that have proven to be successful abroad by modifying them to the needs of young people in Dublin. Hence after discussing my findings along my trip to Bergen in Norway I lay out five general and give specific projects.
In Bergen (Norway) there is a urban mining initiative led by Building Innovation which treats the city as a mine of resources that could be re-purposed as part of a circular economy. Specifically, building material can be collected from one site and re-purposed at a new site such as wooden support beams, intact windows and other items in good conditions. Thus when a new building is built or a renovation takes place, the ‘waste’ produced is first inspected as a prospective resource which can be repurposed for future development.
Another Norwegian example of a circular economy is on the popular search engine www.finn.no where boats, houses, jobs, household items and more can be found. On this page there are several advertisements that can be found under ‘gis bort’ meaning ‘giving away’. These are items that the owners are offering for free to people, though usually collection is expected. The beauty of this method is that a lot of stuff that ends up in the bin could be of value to others. Students can benefit from this system along with waste management for office upgrades.
The local waste management service BIR has a Re-use Initiative where citizens can drop of used items including electronics. These are then inspected by professionals which offer access to other citizens to collect them for free. Any item that isn’t deep suitable for re-use is immediately recycled. This offers a good way to deal with scratched but otherwise working electronics and offers individuals from economically disadvantaged communities access to free electronics. It also significantly reduces waste, a win for climate justice.
BIR is also part of the European HOOP project in which BIR seeks to re-purpose food waste. Examples are the conversion of food waste into biogas, compost, and feed for insects and algae which are used in feed of farmed fish. The re-use of food waste could be achieved locally in compost production in a garden.
Libraries constantly acquire new books as new editions and new titles are released. Have you ever wondered what happens with the old books? At some point the library must rid itself of obsolete books that rarely if ever get loaned out or their collection would balloon out of control! So how do they do it?
It depends on the library, but a lot of libraries simply bin them. Personally I think this is grotesque, here is knowledge that someone spend time on, others worked to materialise into a physical book from the editors to the publishing company. All that work just thrown away, treating knowledge as waste. It doesn’t have to be that way. Whilst living in Norway I learned that some libraries had started to agree with this and were implementing a system to avoid throwing away books. After all, a lot of people had interests in these books! Since I’ve been spending so much of my time in Ireland, I’ll be taking a trip to Norway to see how the new system looks like and what it has evolved into! I’ll be interviewing staff at the science library at the University of Bergen where I remember they had such a system already in place and hear from them what has become of it!
I attended a webinar (29.05.2026) held by Dr. Mohammad Reza Ghaani from Trinity College Dublin on sustainable practices used in Irish industries. Whilst it is challenging to condense the entire session into a concise section for a digital toolkit, there are some key lessons I would like to focus on that will inspire prospective projects a future climate justice volunteer could work on.
If one industry no longer has a use for a resource, you try to find a use of it in another industry, this is known as Industrial Symbiosis. Examples include:
The principle to circularity can be applied to pharma & chemical industries, manufacturing & construction and from smaller family businesses to larger industrial estates. The effects on our climate could be enormous.
In the market there is a cost associated with waste. Whilst it is true that recycling can incur a cost, this is usually when the method used isn’t optimised. What remains fixed however is the loss of finance spent on resources e.g. unused timber that recycling can recover. Another motivation stems from a regulatory shifts which makes non-compliance costly. A carbon tax for example makes it beneficial to reduce emissions or risk financial loss through fees. Finally, there is the issue that landfills and other methods of waste disposal are not sustainable. We cannot continue to generate waste indefinitely on Earth given the finite resources that are available. It is equivalent to insisting every human gets buried permanently on a graveyard, at some point you will run out of space!
Apart from resource costs and regulatory shifts, other benefits include:
There are of course some barriers to implementing an ideal circularity system. A successful implementation has to overcome:
The hope however is that these barriers are a temporary problem and that a digital backbone of sensors and standard can streamline the introduction of symbiosis into industry. We could very well life in a world where for example the compliance of emissions or other wastes are digitally monitored in real time with new sensors which could verify claims of recycling and allow us to focus on points where industry can be optimised further.
To determine the degree of success in circularity, it can be useful to look at:
All of these can contribute to the return of investment. There is thus a financial incentive to engage in industrial symbiosis.
To help convert industrial practices into communal applications, inspiration was drawn from environmental actions conducted at the Thuringia International School Weimar, Germany in 2021.$^{[1]}$ The advantage of this approach is that the feasibility of these actions have thus already been demonstrated whilst also having a link to industrial practices in Ireland to which young people can relate to as they seek employment later in life. These projects also overlap strongly with the proposals inspired from Norwegian projects.
[1] M. Auer et. al., Environment Action: What Has Been Done & What Can Be Done, 2021, (unpublished school project).
During my Leadership in Action I travelled to Norway to learn more about endeavours that could be modified or directly adapted in communities in Dublin. I wanted to find examples beyond literature research and focus on meeting people and hearing directly from them. I wanted to photograph and add a personal touch to this toolkit. Hence in this section alone, all the photos are taken by myself in the city of Bergen, Norway. I’ve lived in Bergen for nearly a decade before I moved to Ireland and learned to speak Norwegian which allowed me to locate interesting sites and effectively communicate ideas with the people I spoke to. My hope is that when you review this toolkit and feel the enormous pressure of climate justice, helping young people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and having to organise it all that as part of my leadership in action I found projects of the same spirit as Localise Youth Volunteering is interested in and that these projects were incredibly successful and well received. You got this!
Food expiration dates are an unusual starting point, but I ask that you bear with me since it affects our climate, society and can help generate ideas for prospective projects. In fact, I will tell you about a project in Bergen that amongst many tasks managed to address the problem of food waste by understanding the difference between ‘best before’ and ‘use by’ food expiration dates. Here is that story.
The ‘best before’ date on most food items (excluding things like raw meat or fish, milk, eggs) usually indicates the date after which the producer can no longer guarantee the quality of the product i.e. if the product has the same texture or taste as advertised, assuming the packaging remained intact and appropriate storage conditions were used. However, the ‘use by’ date of food products are about safety i.e. when the product can longer be consumed (goes off). For most food products this is always long after the ‘best before’ date, again assuming the packaging and storage conditions were appropriate. The use of ‘best before’ over ‘use by’ by food producers is in part to drive up sales. By giving food products a shorter shelf time, consumers are incentivised to make more purchases when they thing something has gone off whilst in reality the food they just threw away is perfectly good for consumption. In restaurants, this is even more true as texture and flavour are key to their income hence they are more likely to throw away food products simply out of the concern it could impact the dining experience. Now think about all of the bakeries, restaurants, school and work canteens, grocery stores, etc. and all of the tons of food they throw away. Society throws away a lot of food that could be give to financially struggling individuals, the homeless, refugees and others in need. But we don’t have to!
There is a foundation located in the city centre of Bergen in Norway that accepts amongst food donations also food products past the ‘best before’ but within legally safe consumption times and serves them to people. This foundation is called Robin Hood Huset and they are engaging in a number of inspiring operations: