Circular Economy at the World Cup 2026

One to save for next year....

Financial Times piece.

Nike sponsored kits for the FIFA men's World Cup 2026 were made from a new material made from textile waste (rather than recycled plastic bottles) to better cope with the heat at the venues.

It's called Aero-FIT.

This provides better thermal comfort.

It also gives hope to a sector which has not been doing well.

66 North and Circularity

My favourite clothing brand is the Icelandic brand: 66 North.

Their gear is 'reassuringly expensive'. It is also designed with the circular economy in mind.

Their website has lots of information on their commitment to circularity, repairs and careful selection of fabrics.

Old habits die hard in Agbogbloshie

For over 10 years, we used the area of Agbogbloshie on the edge of the Ghanaian capital city of Accra as a case study.

There was a video on Vimeo called e-Wasteland. It is still available to view. It has no narration, but some text captions and the sounds of the activity in this area. It was made by David Fedele in 2012 - which was when we started using it. You will possibly need to login (a free account can be created) to view it.

I thought that the activity had ended due to new methods and efforts to educate the workforce into the risks they were taking - particuarly the accumulation of mercury and other toxic heavy metals into their bloodstreams which shortened their life expectancy.

This article from this weekend suggests that actually the practice is still taking place, so we will perhaps revisit the place, and see what we can see - the area of burning used to be very visible on Google Earth.

Fast Fashion

Reducing the impact of fast fashion.

UEA: The Stuff of Life Exhibition

This is closely linked to our Year 8 unit on the Geography of Stuff.

A new exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre  at UEA has opened.

The policy as with other recent exhibitions is that visitors pay what they can afford under what they call a Universal Ticket.

The exhibition is called The Stuff of Life / The Life of Stuff.

In this major international exhibition, visitors will meet artworks composed of salvaged materials, resynthesised fragments, and e-waste. They will encounter new environmental zones, where synthetic and organic matter interact, providing a fertile ground for the invention of mythical worlds, dystopias and speculative future narratives.

These hybrid living-art entities have life stories that begin with the histories of the objects from which they have been born, and which tie them intimately to the things that construct our own sense of reality and animate our immediate environments. Through these challenging, empathic, and creative encounters with the artworks, visitors are asked to reimagine their relationship to synthetic materials and commodities designed not-to-last, and consider who is responsible for consumption, over-production, and waste streams in modern society. Ultimately, these artworks demonstrate the ingenuity of human creativity to re-imagine our relationships with the planet and inspire people to positively engage with our shared future.

Plastic recycling investigation

A good story from Reuters which focusses on another project where GPS tags have been used to identify the truth about the movements of items. This time round it was trainers.

AQA Pre-release 2022

I was told yesterday that the AQA GCSE pre-release material for the 2022 summer exam season was based in / or mentioned Ely, so I asked for a copy and discovered that it was based on an application by Amey to add an incinerator to their existing waste management park near Waterbeach / Denny Abbey to the south of Ely, along the A10.

The scheme was controversial, although the benefits were clearly stated by the company. A protest group was set up, and commissioned a report on the impact of the proposal, which included mention of the chimney which would be taller than Ely Cathedral and spoil the view towards it from Madingley (a place of geographical significance).

Interestingly, for a pre-release where students usually have to weigh up whether a planned development should go ahead, the decision has already been made in that the scheme was .... spoiler alert.... turned down in 2020.

I tried to add some local contexts - newspaper articles, campaign group reports, local landscape character analysis reports etc. into the mix and shared to the community - AQA is the most popular GCSE specification choice so there will be lots of teachers looking to prepare something on this, and we are all working at our limits at the moment with hybrid learning for many still due to students recovering at home from COVID.

Anthony Bennett has added a copy of the document to his page of pre-release materials. This is available to subscribers and non-subscribers of Internet Geography.

An editable version is below or on this link...

Feel free to download a copy and add your own ideas to the document - there have already been some deletions from the document which is a little disappointing, but I have been able to recover to previous versions.

Images: Alan Parkinson and shared under CC license

Crisp Packet Recycling

We now have 3 crisp packet recycling bins.
Place your EMPTY CRISP PACKETS, and nothing else, in the bins
.
The Year 7 and 8 bin is near the back entrance to the link area, by the door to the table tennis tables area.

Recycled Plastic in Malaysia

This is another link with our work on the geographies of our stuff, and the globalised nature of the world. We are connected in many ways.

The Mirror has a piece today on Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's latest campaign. He is exploring the places that our recycled plastic goes. It turns out, shock horror, that some of it isn't actually recycled, just sent to a poorer part of the world. Remember the e-waste we explored that wasn't supposed to be exported but was...
There is a forthcoming programme with Hugh and Anita Rani on this issue in early June.

And some countries are preparing to send the waste back... "Return to Sender"
It's not just the UK doing this of course, remember that too.
And finally, we even have connections between our parts of the curriculum...

Look at this tweet here:

Plastic collected throughout the region will be used to create a dance arena in the Shangri-La area at this year's Glastonbury Festival in a collaboration between Orca Sound Project, Shangri-La and Keep Britain Tidy, who are aiming to collect 10 tonnes of waste.

— Lego Lost At Sea (@LegoLostAtSea) May 31, 2019

Tokyo 2020 medals

As you can see from the diagram above, a project which was launched a few years ago in Japan is close to finishing.
All the medals at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 will be made from metals recovered from e-Waste.
I am putting together a presentation on this for Year 8 students, and it will be shared when completed.

Agbogbloshie: e-wasteland

Agbogbloshie is a suburb of the city of Accra on the Atlantic coast of Ghana in West Africa.

It is a well known example of a community which receives illegal shipments of e-waste, which provides employment for young men, often migrants from the north of Ghana. Cables are burned to melt the plastic revealing the copper wire.


Attempts are being made to stop the burning.

Pure Earth blog has more details on this.

In the most recent Geographical Journal from the RGS-IBG, there was an article on the places in the world where this activity takes place - it is not only Ghana, and in most cases there is a hierarchy of jobs which sustains other employment.

Source of image: https://www.voanews.com/a/wire-strippers-bring-some-relief-from-toxic-smokein-ghana/2498347.html 

Welcome to Daisy - a replacement for LIAM

We've been looking at E-Waste, and the role of Agbobloshie....
Previously there was Liam



Here's a story from earlier this week about Daisy, which can dismantle 200 iPhones an hour.
Our question was, what happens to Liam now? Do we need some robots to dismantle him?



Image: Apple

Junkyard Planet

This book by Adam Minter looks like it might be a useful addition to the unit on the GEOGRAPHY OF MY STUFF we're starting with Year 8.

You can read a bit of the book using the LOOK INSIDE feature on Amazon.

I liked this line from the opening as a possible discussion focus for students to consider, and provide some explanatory statements for.

"Here's something true in all places and times: the richer you are, and the more educated you are, the more stuff you will throw away".