After the morning coffee was finished, and the half consumed new years snacks from the night before were cleared away, I sat down in the armchair before the fire and clicked “publish video”. It was a short one - a whole 90 seconds - but these 90 seconds had brewed in my mind for a full two years already.
As this blog has documented, I’ve walked thousands of kilometres around Ireland. Whether on forest trails, windswept mountain sides, or thriving riverbanks, outdoor spaces bring me both an exhilarating joy and a grounding peace. The Irish outdoors has given me so much, and so it only stands to reason, that it’s time I gave something back.
The average Irish home creates one tonne of waste, every year. And so, over the course of 2023, my aim is to remove one tonne of waste from the Irish environment. I’m weighing in - both literally each month with the rubbish I’ll collect, and also on the environmental conversation happening here in Ireland, and around the world. This is the Weighing In Project.
For me, two years is a long time to be thinking about a project - in fact, it’s longer than I’ve let any project stew for. It’s gone through a variety of names, different research into how much or what kind of waste statistics I was going to use.
But in the end, I think the reason I haven’t been able to let this idea go, is because of the memories of things dumped in the most bizarre or hard-to-get-to places. The in the moment thoughts of “just how did they get that washing machine into the middle of this bog”, or “but it’s free to drop this off at a recycling centre, why is it here?”.
So here we go - 1 tonne of rubbish from the Irish Outdoors, and hopefully we can raise a bit of awareness along the way. Learn more about this project here, or head to the “projects” tab above. Here is the launch video for the project. If you want to keep up to date with this project specifically, you can subscribe to a dedicated newsletter for it at the bottom of this page.