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Opportunities of teaching Sustainability with Desktop Injection Machines and 3D Printers
By Rory Dickens
Sustainability in schools is often introduced through simple, well-meaning actions. Use less plastic. Sort waste correctly, and a tonne of theory. These ideas are important, but they can leave students with an incomplete picture of how product lifecycles exist in the real world.
When sustainability is taught only as behaviour, it risks becoming symbolic rather than practical. Students learn what they should do, but not how objects are designed, why waste exists, or what it actually takes to turn discarded material into something useful.
The real learning begins when students are shown the whole system.
From waste to product
When a plastic bottle is transformed into a new object within a single lesson, sustainability becomes tangible. The process might involve shredding, melting, forming, and finishing, but the impact goes far beyond the material itself.
Students quickly discover that recycled plastics behave unpredictably. One batch flows easily, another does not. A design that looked fine on screen refuses to inject properly. Small changes in geometry lead to large differences in outcome. These moments prompt questions that cannot be answered by theory alone.
Leading to students to question why does this material behave differently? Why does design matter so much and why is repeatability difficult?
Through making, students encounter the realities of manufacturing. They begin to understand constraints, trade-offs and decision-making in a way that mirrors professional design practice.
Understanding why recycling is difficult
Recycling is often presented as a logistical or ethical challenge. In practice, it is also a design problem.
When students process recycled materials themselves, they see first-hand why recycling at scale is complex. Contamination affects performance and mixed materials cause failures. While products not designed with the end-of-life in mind only perpetuate the problem of so low global recycling rates.
Crucially, this hands-on experience does not lead to pessimism. It does the opposite. Students realise that many of these challenges are solvable through better design choices made earlier in a product’s life. Potentially encouraging them to consider designing for disassembly or by creating forms that tolerate variation rather than demand perfection. These principles are far more meaningful when discovered through practice rather than explanation.
Moving beyond craft recycling
Many schools in the UK are already running small-scale recycling activities. Melting bottle caps into sheets using a panini press, cutting shapes by hand, or producing simple tiles and tokens are common and lowcost entry points for schools of all sizes. However, these approaches do not reflect how most plastic products are made.
The majority of everyday plastic items are injection moulded. Their design constraints, tooling requirements and production logic differ significantly from sheet forming or hand fabrication. Without exposure to injection moulding, students miss an opportunity to understand how industrial manufacturing actually works and as a result are lulled into a false sense of how real world recycled plastic products are actually made.
Desktop-scale injection moulding such as Sustainable Design Studios Injection Mini brings these lessons into the classroom in an accessible way. Students get to design parts, injection mould them, assess the results, and then refine their ideas. Allowing teachers to teach concepts such as draft angles, fillets, wall thickness and repeatability along side the existing sustainability topics.
Bridging the gap between school-based making and real-world production.
Designing tools as well as products
Another innovation in the sector is the combination of injection moulding with 3D printing which has opened up a tonne of new possibilities for education. Using 3D printed mould holders, students and teachers can now design and produce their own moulds at a very low cost when compared to traditional mould manufacture.
This removes a significant barrier. Instead of relying on externally manufactured tooling, learners can prototype, test and iterate within the classroom setting. Exploring multiple iterations in parallel, and without the restriction of potentially failing on the first attempt.
For more advanced projects, aluminium CNC-machined moulds still play an important role, particularly where surface finish or durability is required but what matters is that schools now have a spectrum of options, allowing the level of complexity to match the learning objective.
Sustainability as a gateway
When sustainability is taught through making, it naturally connects to a wider set of skills. Product design leads to material science. Manufacturing introduces mathematics and process planning. Iteration encourages critical evaluation. Communicating the value of a recycled product brings in storytelling, presentation, marketing and even entrepreneurship.
As a results students move from simply reusing materials to considering why someone would choose a product made from recycled plastic, what value it offers, and how design decisions affect both performance and perception.
Support for educators
As interest in circular economy projects grows, many teachers are looking for ways to move beyond isolated activities and towards coherent, curriculum-ready systems. This often includes guidance on equipment, safety, lesson structure and material handling.
Organisations such as Sustainable Design Studio work alongside educators to provide practical support in this area, helping schools implement small-scale manufacturing and recycling processes in ways that are appropriate for classroom use. We encourage you to explore our free resources found on our website which include the topic of good product design practices and even guides on how to design and print your own 3D printed moulds.
Designing the next generation
Teaching sustainability is no longer just about encouraging better habits. It is about developing better designers.
By giving students hands-on experience with recycled materials, real manufacturing processes and iterative design thinking, schools can prepare them to address environmental challenges through practical solutions.
Not simply by reducing waste, but by designing systems in which waste is less likely to exist at all. As a result we hope that through these valuable lessons not only are we inspiring, we are also empowering the future Sustainable Designers of tomorrow.
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