Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Tune In: Choose your own recycling adventure

20 minutes

Find Out: Unmake it!

25 minutes

Take Action: How does the recycling process work?

5 minutes

Reflection

Learning intentions

Students will:

understand the lifecycle of mobile phones, including their disposal and recycling
explore the environmental impact and benefits of proper recycling practices.

Success criteria

Students can:

evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the lifecycle of mobile phones and their production, consumption and disposal
identify the benefits of using, reusing and recycling mobile phones
outline the importance of specific recycling practices for mobile phones.

Tune In: Choose your own recycling adventure

Step 1

Pose the following question to your students.

What happens to mobile phones when they are no longer needed or wanted?

Ask them to discuss their answers with the person next to them before sharing their responses with the class.

Step 2

Explain to students that they will be exploring some of the options they brainstormed by participating in a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ activity. Each team will be given a link to the branching story and will need to decide as a group which path to follow at each interval. Let students know this is a friendly game and there will be opportunities to earn or lose points for their team.

Step 3

Invite students to form (or if you have completed the previous lesson in this Unit, How are Mobile Phones Made? reform) groups of four and ask each group to open the link Choose your own adventure activity using a personal device.

You may like to talk through the activity with your students by using the first page as an example.

“You have a mobile phone. You’ve had it for around two years. It still works, but it’s not the latest model that your best friend has. It’s also getting a little slow and looks a little beaten up. It’s coming up to your birthday and you’re thinking about asking for the latest model as your present.”

Explain that each page will prompt the groups to make a decision and follow their choice to the next part of the story. For this first page, their choices are

Ask for the latest model – Go to Part 2
Decide to keep the one you have until it stops working – Go to Part 3

Explain that on each page there will be options for the group and a part to go to based on that decision. Remind the class that while working in their groups, they should remain respectful and listen to each other before making a decision.

Step 4

Ask one student from each group to be an impartial observer and record scores as groups progress through the story. These observers will report the scores back to you at the end of the activity.

Step 5

When all the groups have finished the activity, record the scores and discuss why groups ended up with the score that they did.

Find Out: Unmake it!

Preparation

For this section, you’ll need four pieces of scrap paper or sticky notes for each group of four students in your class. Write either ‘plastics’, ‘metals’, ‘glass’ or ‘unsure’ on each group’s set of four pieces of paper.

Step 1

Based on their learning from the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ activity, ask the students what they think is the best option for a mobile phone once it can’t be used anymore.

Step 2

In the previous lesson in this Unit, How are Mobile Phones Made?, students put together a paper mobile phone using this using this Make Your Own Mobile Phone Worksheet. If you completed this lesson, students can reuse their mobile phones. If you haven’t completed this lesson you can hand out the worksheet so students can cut out the components, or you could challenge students to make the phone using the instructions in the shortest time possible.

Step 3

Hand out a set of four pieces of paper with ‘plastics’, ‘metals’, ‘glass’ or ‘unsure’ to each group. Invite groups to make space to work and lay out the four pieces of paper in front of their group.

Step 4

Explain to students they are now going to ‘unmake’ (or dismantle) their paper phones for recycling. Working in the same groups, students need to pull apart their model phones OR cut out the Paper Phone Worksheet and place the components around one of the pieces of paper they were handed, corresponding to the type of recycling bin this component would go into.

Invite students to begin dismantling their phones and categorising the components that they find inside.

Step 5

When the groups are all finished, discuss what everyone put in each category. Discuss with your students whether or not this was an easy task. What was tricky about recycling the components of the phone?

Explain to students that lots of the components of mobile phones are made up of many different types of materials; for instance, the camera has glass and metal, and the batteries are made from chemicals, plastic and metal components. This is why mobile phones need to be recycled properly so that they can be taken apart and sorted properly in order to recover as much of the material as possible.

Take Action: How does the recycling process work?

Step 1

Watch the following clip to help demonstrate how mobile phones are recycled through MobileMuster and ask students to take note of how the phone components are recycled.

MobileMuster - What Happens When You Recycle? (vimeo.com/349554548)

From the video, students will hear that the materials from a mobile phone are sorted into different piles – circuit boards, metals, glass, plastic and batteries.

Reiterate to students that unwanted mobile phones cannot be placed in your household recycling bin and if we send them to landfill we lose the materials inside forever. They need to be recycled through special processes to ensure we can continue to use the precious materials inside.

Step 2

Your student's task will be to create a class-wide overview of the steps and importance of recycling mobile phones through a system like MobileMuster. Divide students into six groups or keep the same groups as the beginning of the lesson and allocate each group to one of the topics below:

Why is recycling through a system like MobileMuster necessary?
Where and how can you recycle in your community?
What happens in the process?
What materials are recovered?
What are the environmental benefits?
What else can people do to have a positive impact?

Encourage students to use the information from the ‘Recycle a mobile’ (mobilemuster.com.au/recycle-a-mobile/) and ‘’Recycling’ (mobilemuster.com.au/recycling/) pages from MobileMuster to create a poster that answers their allocated question.

Step 3

Once students have created their posters, display each group’s on a wall next to each other to show the entire process. Invite each group to talk about their topic and part in the process so the other groups can learn about it.

Reflection

Prompt students to reflect on the lesson and Unit using the Imagine If… Visible Thinking Routine (pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Imagine%20if.pdf ) by answering the following question:

Imagine if the current way people buy, use and dispose of their mobile phones was the best it could be. What would this world look like?

How are Mobile Phones Recycled?

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Summary

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