Deputy President Professor Daire Keogh at a tree planting ceremony outside Albert College

DCU hosts special tree planting by MT Summit as part of effort to reduce carbon footprint

05/12/2019

Two new trees - paid from the proceeds of last August's Machine Translation (MT) Summit as part of their bid to reduce their carbon footprint - were planted outside Albert College in DCU's Glasnevin campus today.

The tree planting ceremony - led by DCU President Brian MacCraith and Deputy President Daire Keogh - attracted a number of DCU staff who were told these new Purple Beech trees would replace trees that were more than 200 years old and died a few years ago.

They are being planted from the proceeds of the MT Summit, which was held in The Helix in DCU last August, and was chaired by Professor Andy Way of DCU.

"This really is the best thing you can do, these trees will be here for years taking in carbon emissions," Prof Way said.

Last August's event was the largest conference on MT globally to date - with approximately 350 researchers, translators and industry partners travelling from all over the world to attend.

Conscious of the increasing risks to our climate and carbon footprint, the conference organisers implemented a number of measures at the time in a bid to make the conference as sustainable as possible.

These measures included:

No delegate bag – reduce waste
Full size programme replaced by a smaller “bradge” which doubles a name badge – reduce paper required
Accommodation – using the onsite accommodation in DCU to reduce transport costs
Promote walking and use of public transport
Increased recycling facilities at venue
Providing water points to refill bottles rather than providing plastic bottle of water

However, it was felt by conference organisers that the most significant and impactful action they could do was to plant two trees to reduce carbon footprint, thereby promoting how we can all do our bit to be more sustainable for this and other events in to the future.

The trees were planted on campus today by President MacCraith and Deputy President Keogh.

"I often think trees can be like education, you just don't know what is going to grow from it. It's fantastic to be apart of something that will live on forever," said Prof Keogh.