Reflecting Back on Learnings
What it is for
- To pull together what the class has seen and learnt so far, and to find out what they actually make of the waste problem.
- To get them to change something in their own week, not just agree in class.
- To teach them how to run a waste audit, using the tools provided.
- TIME – 50 minutes
- MATERIALS – discussions, waste audits, film screenings
- TEACHING SEQUENCE
- Show films about people who have actually done it.
- The first is an animated film on why reusing, reducing and recycling is both possible and worth doing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr_DGf77OhM The second follows a woman who decided to live without producing waste — what she ran into, what she worked out, and why she believes one person's choices matter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT0uqEPzbd0
- Then discuss. Clear up whatever is still muddled, and go properly into zero waste, reuse, recycling and upcycling — including the difference between recycling a thing and upcycling it.
The manual states these. What it does not state is not here.
How it runs
The manual gives this session no step list. What it does give is below.
- To pull together what the class has seen and learnt so far, and to find out what they actually make of the waste problem.
- To get them to change something in their own week, not just agree in class.
- To teach them how to run a waste audit, using the tools provided.
TIME – 50 minutes
MATERIALS – discussions, waste audits, film screenings
TEACHING SEQUENCE
- Show films about people who have actually done it.
The first is an animated film on why reusing, reducing and recycling is both possible and worth doing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr_DGf77OhM The second follows a woman who decided to live without producing waste — what she ran into, what she worked out, and why she believes one person's choices matter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT0uqEPzbd0
- Then discuss. Clear up whatever is still muddled, and go properly into zero waste, reuse, recycling and upcycling — including the difference between recycling a thing and upcycling it.
Talking about it
Discussion points, worked examples and the handouts the manual prints with this session.
Points for discussion
- How does badly managed waste reach them personally — the dengue in their colony, the smoke from a burning dump, the drain that overflows every monsoon?
- Which changes would they actually find easy? Take the easy ones seriously. Those are the ones that last.
- Small changes matter because they spread. One student carrying a steel bottle changes nothing. One class asking the canteen to stop handing out plastic spoons changes the canteen.
- Zero waste is a set of principles aimed at preventing waste rather than managing it. The goal is that nothing needs a landfill, an incinerator or the sea, because things are designed to be used again. Nature is the model: nothing in a forest is thrown away.
- The key distinction is prevention versus end-of-pipe. Recycling and reuse deal with things after they exist. Zero waste asks how they were made and sold in the first place — the sachet, the layered wrapper, the appliance built so it cannot be repaired.
- Food is waste too. Food cooked and not eaten, food that rots between the field and the mandi, food thrown out by a wedding or a canteen. Ask the class what happens to the leftover food at a function they have been to.
- Perfectly good fruit and vegetables get rejected for being the wrong shape or the wrong size before they ever reach a shelf. Ask a vegetable seller what happens to whatever does not sell by evening.
- The plastic drinking-water bottle deserves its own conversation. Where does the class get water when they are out? What did people do before the bottle existed — the piyau, the matka outside the shop, the jug on the counter?
- Water gets wasted too, and it never goes near a bin. A dripping tap loses water all day and all night. Send the class to find every leaking tap in their own school and count them. That is a waste audit, and it is the easiest one anybody will ever fix.
ADDITIONAL WORKSHEETS & RESOURCES
REVISION WORKSHEET
Q1. What is waste?
Q2. Where does waste come from?
Q3. What are the different types of waste?
Q4. How much solid waste does India produce in a day, and how much of it is collected?
Q5. What has made us produce more waste than our grandparents did?
Q6. Trace the journey of waste. It leaves your bin — then what?
Q7. What do waste-pickers do, and why does recycling in India depend on them?
Q8. What did you see on the walk, and what has stayed with you?
Q9. What does waste do to land, to water and to air?
Q10. What would you actually change, and who would you have to convince?
Where this comes from
Bridge the Gap is a compilation. This is what the manual records for this session.
The manual prints no source for this session. It is published here as Swechha has used it, adapted over years of classroom work; if you recognise its origin, tell us and we will credit it.
Before you start sets out where the compendium as a whole comes from.
Next
Where to go from here.