Loading
Being at theUKUKDYour browser does not support the element. heart of an experiment isn’t new for Rathlin Island. It was from the L-shaped outcrop off Northern Ireland’s north-eastern coast that Guglielmo Marconi sent the world’s first commercial wireless transmission in 1898. More than a century later, the province’s only inhabited island is a laboratory again.Rathlin has set itself a net-zero date of 2030. Even if it got there, the impact on the climate would be negligible. The island has just 140 inhabitants. It got mains electricity only in 1992 and an undersea cable to the electrical grid in 2007. For years the only vehicles were the islanders’ cars, the odd tractor and a bus taking tourists to see the 250,000 resident seabirds.But small communities can be good places to test new ideas. Two years ago the devolved government in Belfast funded a community e-car and 20 e-bikes. In 2023 a consortium led by Ulster University was given £4.6m ($5.7m) by the ’s Arts and Humanities Research Council to look in particular at how waste on the island might be dealt with more effectively.One of the big ideas was to reuse plastic waste, which is not just discarded by islanders and tourists but also washes up along the coastline. The team distributed simple leaflet instructions for beach-litter picking; the waste was taken to Belfast for processing. The project also involves educational activities and “repair cafés” to fix broken items.Some islanders are doing things differently. Marina McMullan’s sheep have been farmed for meat for as long as she can remember. Now she’s also making plastic-free rope from the wool. Marianne Green, another resident, hopes the wool rope can be used to farm seaweed around the island. “Imagine if we were able to use Rathlin wool to grow Rathlin seaweed,” she enthuses.But the Rathlin project shows how difficult it is to alter habits. Much of the island’s waste is still being dumped in landfill; plans to reuse processed plastic on the island through 3 printing have been discarded. The plan “needs more of a technological support infrastructure”, says Justin Magee, who’s leading the project. He says the work hasn’t been wasted, however. Beach plastic can be hard to recycle because of damage caused by ultraviolet light while it is in the ocean. But the team managed to do so and is in talks about how degraded polymers might be reused commercially.It was in a Rathlin cave that Robert the Bruce, a Scottish king, reputedly watched a spider eventually succeed after repeated attempts to spin its web across the entrance. That supposedly strengthened his resolve to fight the English. Worthy as it is, Rathlin’s battle against landfill is less likely to echo down the generations.
