CORK CITY COUNCILLORS this evening agreed to give the ‘robo trees’ on Grand Parade six more months rather than dumping them, after two separate studies found the data collected from them to be inconclusive as to their effectiveness.
The council is facing another €18,000 maintenance fee for the five CityTrees this year, which were produced by a German company and are supposed to use moss walls to clean pollutants from the surrounding air.
This week the council published a report on the data collected from the robo trees which summarised the findings of two studies on the effectiveness of the trees, which found that the data is inconclusive.
The study conducted by the company that made the appliances suggested that Grand Parade is too windy of an environment for the data collected from the trees to be reliable, while the UCC study on the trees stated that the data cannot prove that the robotic trees are improving air quality.
The robo trees also double up as public seating, and have become a popular spot for members of the public to sit and chat.
Tonight, councillors informally agreed to give the robo trees project six more months in the hopes that the effectiveness of the trees can be proven, as they weighed up options including dumping them, plugging them out and keeping them as “street furniture”, and giving them to an educational facility.
Labour party Councillor John Maher suggested that it was time to “pull the plug” on the robo trees, and admit that purchasing them was “a mistake”.
Fine Gael Councillor Des Cahill weighed up the options facing the council at tonight’s meeting.
‘What happens if we dump them? We admit defeat, we don’t know what the cost of dumping them is, but we dump them anyway. Keep them unplugged? Not a bad compromise. Or, we keep them and wait for six to 12 months to see if the data remains inconclusive… and it also gives the directors enough time to explore the many educational facilities in Ireland to see what use they might have for them,” he deliberated.
Cahill ultimately advocated for the latter option.
“It would be foolhardy to quit and run now. While it will be very easy for the radio stations and everyone else to say we are as mad as a bag of cats, I would be supporting saying, let’s give it another chance.
“Let’s look at the other values that it has, and I think, for fear that in two years’ time it turns out that we could have used them in other circumstances, either internally or externally,” he said.
Cahill’s was the most popular view, as eight other councillors agreed, while four wanted to go for other options.
There has been some backlash to the robo trees project from academics, and local representatives, including Labour candidate for Cork City South East Peter Horgan, who said that it is essentially a “greenwashing exercise”.
“It’s time this experiment came to an end. This project is damaging climate mitigation projects elsewhere in the city. This is Cork City’s version of the E-voting machines. Keeping this as a rolling item isn’t viable,” Horgan said.
The five robo trees each cost €64,995, and a considerable amount of money has already been paid out for their maintenance.
The funding for the project came from a Government grant rather that the council’s budget.
During the same council meeting, councillors heard from management that the budget was not in place to have an event to mark the Christmas lights being turned on in the city this year, as it would cost somewhere in the region of €50,000.
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