Resources: The handout and resources dependent on events and campaign materials required by students.
Core Handout: Ideas for campaign and questions to evaluate how successful their campaign was.
Review relevant KS2 and KS3 learning, such as the importance of recycling materials like paper, glass, metal, and plastic. Recap on how these materials are sorted, processed, and turned into new products. The students will likely be familiar with non-renewable natural resources such as oil, gas, and coal and how they are used to produce energy and materials.
Discuss the concept of recycling and why it is important to look after the Earth's limited resources.
Expand the discussion by reviewing the following questions as a class:
Use the presentation slides to define renewable and non-renewable resources. Get students to discuss how paper companies can get a sustainable wood supply. Continue with slides covering the raw material used to make non-renewable materials such as metals and plastic and then explain the 4Rs. Use the slides to consider materials that can be recycled.
Career Film: Take a tour around Rolls Royce SMR's Heritage Museum in Derby to find out about Elliott Thompson's job. Elliott works as the Reactor Island Verification Lead for Rolls Royce SMR.
Expert Film: This is Lucas Martin. Lucas works as an Environment Interface Engineer for Rolls Royce SMR. Listen to Lucas as he describes renewable and non-renewable natural resources.
Recycling Campaign
The students will work together to create a recycling campaign in their school. Guidance and ideas are provided in the handout.
Students should try and collect data so they can evaluate how effective their campaign was. You may have to investigate what data your school collects already regarding its waste disposal. If data is not collected, students could collect qualitative data, such as by looking at how full the recycling bins are.
Once the campaign is over, the students should use page 2 of the handout to reflect on and evaluate their campaign.
Support: You may want to assign students different roles, or assign them to different parts of the campaign.
Challenge: Ask the students to produce a presentation that they could give to the headteacher or school governors about their recycling campaign.
At the end of lesson, get the students to discuss plans for their campaign, and how they are going to implement the campaign between lessons.
The Earth's resources are limited, meaning it is important to consider the best ways to re-use and recycle as much as we can. To achieve sustainable development, we must consider the best ways to improve living standards through economic advancement, whilst protecting the environment and raising awareness of resources that are energy intensive to obtain.
These are particularly important considerations within the electronics industry where demand for devices such as laptops, smartphones and tablets is increasing rapidly. As demand increases, so do the raw material extraction rates. For example, over the past 10 years, rates of iron ore production have increased by 180%, cobalt production have increased by 165%, and lithium production have increased by 125%. At the same time, mining operations are having to go deeper into the Earth's surface to extract the resources we need. Furthermore, the metal ores being extracted are of lower purity than those mined 100 years ago, and large mining projects typically produce vast quantities of waste.
Around 500 to 1000 different components are required to make a single smartphone and some of these need to be sourced from countries with poor human rights, unsafe mining practices, and poor environmental protection standards. A single smartphone contains many different chemical elements within a range of different compounds. For example, the transparent touchscreens usually contain indium, tin and oxygen; the glass is usually composed of aluminium, silicon, oxygen, and potassium; the batteries are usually composed of lithium, cobalt, carbon, aluminium, and oxygen; copper is usually used for the wiring; silicon is normally used within the microchips; and a range of rare-earth elements (such as lanthanum, terbium, gadolinium, and europium) are usually used to produce colours in the screen.
In the environment, recycling happens naturally through the carbon and nitrogen cycles. Taking inspiration from these processes, it is important for us to consider how best to recycle common resources we use such as glass, aluminium, paper, and plastic. Recycling typically requires less energy than having to make the item again from raw materials, even when the costs of separation and collection are accounted for.
Glass can be easily melted and re-moulded, into new bottles for example. However, glass needs to be sorted into different colours and there is a time and energy cost associated with taking glass to a recycling plant.
Aluminium is an attractive resource to recycle because it has a relatively low melting point. However, it can be difficult to extract pure aluminium if an item has been made using an alloy (i.e. a mixture of different metals).
Paper can be recycled by breaking it up into small pieces and then re-forming it into new sheets. This avoids having to grow and process trees to make new paper. However, this process cannot be carried out too many times with the same material because the fibres become too short and the paper can then only be used for lower quality products such as toilet paper and cardboard.
Some plastics can be recycled into items such as fleece clothing. This avoids the use of crude oil and the need for raw materials used to make plastics, which can be relatively scarce. Recycling plastic stops much of it ending up in landfill sites, but different types of plastics have to be separated from one another.