The Circular Economy

Teacher Tips

Hook

• Once they have chosen an object, ask "How would you repair it if it broke tomorrow?" Most learners can answer for a jumper and almost none can answer for anything with a battery in it. That gap is core to the entire session.
• The reveal hands learners a ready-made excuse: it's the designers' fault, not mine. Expect it, and name it. Design shapes the choices available, it doesn't remove them, and the session ends by asking what they would design differently.

ITZA Pathways

• The number that does the work in Pathway 1 is the comparison between a tonne of old phones and a tonne of ore. Once they have it, you could ask "Why aren't mining companies simply mining our bins?" The answer, that collecting and taking things apart costs more than digging, is the whole argument for designing products differently.
• Pathway 2's decomposers are Session 1's clean-up crew in another costume. Try asking "What would a landfill look like if fungi ran it?" The answer, that there wouldn't be one, is the cleanest statement of circular thinking in the course.
• Biological and technical nutrients is the idea the activity depends on and the one most likely to be clicked past. It's worth testing with something awkward: a leather shoe with a rubber sole and metal eyelets. Most objects are both kinds of nutrient glued together, which is precisely why they are so hard to deal with.

Classroom Activity

• The first version of the story matters more than it looks. If a pair writes "it goes in the bin", the rewrite has nothing to push against. Ask for a first story that says where the object actually ends up and what happens to it there.
• Rewrites reach for recycling because it's the familiar word. You can steer towards repair, resale, sharing and refurbishment. The best stories keep the object being itself for longer, rather than shredding it into a lower-grade version of itself.
• The swap is where the assessment happens. Pairs spot the unrealistic step in someone else's story much faster than in their own, so give them something specific to answer rather than "what did you think", such as "Which step in this story would be hardest to make happen?"

Plenary

• Part 2 asks them to redesign a product, and most will answer "make it from recycled plastic". You could push towards the design change that stops it becoming waste at all: parts that come apart, a battery you can replace, a standard screw instead of glue.
• The exit route the hook opened up, that this is all the designers' problem, can come back here. The three Rs are in this session precisely because two of them are available to young people right now.
• The lock-in is from Tom Szaky, an entrepreneur who founded the recycling company TerraCycle. It says waste is a human invention. It's a great line and very nearly true, and a sharp learner may find the exception. Nature has produced waste it couldn't process: coal exists because early trees fell and nothing had yet evolved to digest them, and the oxygen we breathe was originally a waste product that poisoned most life on Earth. It's worth allowing, because it makes the point sharper rather than weaker. Nature's loops aren't perfect, they are just very old.