Teaching sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Tune In: Liveable cities

20 minutes

Find Out: What’s the cost of litter?

25 minutes

Take Action: Collective actions for collective impacts

5 minutes

Reflection

Learning intentions

Students will:

understand the social, environmental and economic impacts of litter in community environments
explore how individual and collective actions can contribute to creating liveable, sustainable cities
identify and analyse different strategies for reducing litter and improving sustainability, relating these to social, environmental, and economic impacts.

Success criteria

Students can:

identify the social, environmental and economic impacts of litter in community environments
summarise the different strategies and actions that can contribute to creating liveable, sustainable communities
analyse a collective action related to sustainability and litter to identify the social, environmental, and economic impacts of its adoption.

Tune In: Liveable cities

Step 1

Begin by using slides 2-6 of the attached Visual Explainer to show students images and visuals of litter and waste in communities.

Ask students to take a few moments to observe each image. Invite students to put their hands up if they have seen scenes like this in their local community or school. Prompt volunteers to share what other types of waste or litter they see in their school or community most frequently. Write these on the board.

Step 2

Considering what students have just seen and thought about from their own lives, prompt a Think-Pair-Share discussion with the question, “What problems are caused by litter in cities and communities beyond just being messy?” Encourage students to consider:

Quality of life
Public health
Safety
Environmental impacts

Suggested responses:

Pollution of air, land and water: Litter breaks down and releases harmful chemicals and microplastics, polluting soil, waterways, and the air, which threatens both environmental and human health.
Harm to wildlife: Animals can ingest or become trapped in litter, leading to injuries or death and these effects extend to both land and marine species.
Health risks for people: Litter attracts pests like rats and mosquitoes, which spread diseases and can also contain hazardous materials such as syringes or chemicals.
Flooding and infrastructure damage: Litter blocks drains and stormwater systems, increasing the risk of city floods and costly repairs.
Microplastic pollution: Many plastics break down into microplastics, which contaminate water, enter the food chain, and may pose long-term health risks for humans.
Economic costs: Cities spend considerable resources on cleaning up litter and the costs are ultimately paid by residents and taxpayers.
Decreased safety and quality of life: Litter can cause accidents, create breeding grounds for bacteria, and make public spaces less safe and enjoyable to use.
Spread of invasive species and fire risk: Some types of litter can introduce invasive weeds or increase fire hazards if left unmanaged.

Step 3

Ask students to close their eyes for a moment and imagine they’re walking through a city with no litter at all.

Then ask, “What would a city without litter look, feel, and smell like?” Jot down student responses on the board in three columns:

Look	Feel	Smell

Step 4

Once you have completed your brainstorm, pose the question to your students: “Could everyday actions help us build that kind of city? What would need to change in our systems?” Encourage students to reflect on the images and their brainstorming to think about what needs to change to create a sustainable, clean, livable community and invite volunteers to share their thoughts.

Hope Framework Cue: Avoid catastrophising; guide students to see this as achievable.

Find Out: What’s the cost of litter?

Step 1

Explain to students that it’s easy to think of litter as just a visual or hygiene issue. But litter isn’t just about mess, it has ripple effects across the environment, society and the economy. In this lesson, students will investigate the impacts of litter across these three contexts and explore how communities can be made more sustainable and liveable through collective actions.

If your students need a refresher on the different pillars of sustainability/types of impacts (Social, Environmental and Economic) you might like to watch this video as a class - What is SUSTAINABILITY? Explained By An Expert - Go Green Post

Step 2

Assign students to groups of 3 and provide each group with a sheet of A3 paper. Ask students to draw a large Venn diagram on their paper with three overlapping circles titled Social, Environmental and Economic. Tell students that each group member needs a different coloured pen and is in charge of one topic in the Venn diagram.

Step 3

Show the following video, which details the impacts of litter through social, environmental and economic lenses. Tell students that as they watch the video, they should pay careful attention to the impacts that might be associated with their topic and write them down in the Venn diagram.

Life Without Litter - TOMRA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyhPvsrVvVA)

Step 4

After watching the video, provide groups with a few moments to discuss their responses and think about whether there are any impacts that could be in the interconnecting parts of the diagram.

Draw a version of the Venn diagram on the board and discuss the students' learnings from the video, filling in the Venn diagram as you go. Use the following suggested responses to help you and encourage students to add their own ideas and continue adding to their diagrams as you discuss.

Social	Environmental	Economic
Reduced enjoyment and well-being: Litter makes it hard for people to enjoy natural spaces like beaches, affecting quality of life and mental health. Damage to community pride: Litter in cities and communities harms the shared environment, reducing civic pride and making areas less welcoming. Influence on behaviour: High levels of litter send a negative social signal, making people more likely to litter themselves.	Harm to wildlife: Marine debris, especially plastics, severely affects birds and marine animals, leading to injury, starvation, or death. Ecosystem damage: Litter pollutes estuaries, waterways, and oceans, damaging critical habitats and making ecosystems less healthy. Threat to ocean health: Healthy oceans are important for healthy humans; marine litter undermines that vital link. Overflowing landfills: An inability to manage single-use packaging leads to rapidly filling landfills and greater environmental strain.	Lower property values: Litter is linked to decreased house prices. Impact on tourism: Litter makes cities, beaches, and other attractions less appealing which discourages visitors and harms local economies. Costs of clean up: Councils and communities take on the costs to remove and manage litter, which diverts resources from other needs. Resource loss: Discarded items, especially drink containers, represent lost materials that could have been recycled and reused.

Step 5

Provide time for each group to research the impact of litter more widely and add their findings to their diagrams. Instruct students to treat their diagrams like a mind map, making connections between their ideas and findings and showing the links between the system. Encourage students to research their assigned topic from the video and then discuss how they all link together. Their goal is to understand how litter impacts sustainability and liveability through the three different lenses.

Either coming back together as a class or pairing two or three groups together, encourage students to share their findings about the impacts of litter and how these impact sustainability and liveability.

Step 6

Once your students have a deeper understanding of the ways that litter can impact a place and its liveability, brainstorm some ways that students think they could lessen these impacts through individual or collective actions.

Step 7

Explain that there are lots of different ways that people are trying to have a more positive impact on their community and the sustainability of the place in which they live. Provide each group with one of the case studies of schools that have implemented School Clean Up days, as well as other initiatives to improve the sustainability and liveability of their community.

Once they have read through their case study, invite groups to share their findings by prompting them with the following questions and discussing as a class.

Who was involved?
What strategy did they use?
What changed or improved?
Was this environmental, social, or economic change, or all three?
Did any communities join forces? e.g school-council partnership?

If you are running short on time, invite groups to discuss these questions with another group and then come together to share the big ideas as a class.

Take Action: Collective actions for collective impacts

Step 1

Provide students with the Student Worksheet and direct them to the following (non-exhaustive) list of strategies, which are all designed to facilitate sustainability and lessen human impact on the environment. Explain that these strategies are the focus of many individuals and communities worldwide as we work towards a sustainable and climate-conscious society. They are also the focus of Clean Up Australia's Litter Prevention Plan.

Read through the strategies together and discuss whether students have heard of them before or can provide other examples.

Strategy	Overview & Example
Clean Ups	What is it? Community events where people gather to pick up litter from public spaces. What's an example? Clean Up Australia Day: Australians join together each year to clean parks, beaches, and streets.
Product Stewardship Schemes	What is it? Programs that make companies responsible for their products and packaging, even after customers are done using them. What's an example? MobileMuster: An organisation that collects old mobile phones for recycling in Australia, which is supported by mobile telecommunication companies that make the devices.
Container Deposit Schemes	What is it? You pay a small deposit for drink bottles and cans and get your money back when you return them for recycling. What’s an example? NSW Return and Earn, Victoria's Container Deposit Scheme: Consumers receive 10c for every drink container returned to be recycled.
Plastics and Packaging Policies	What is it? Rules that ban or limit single-use plastics and require packaging to be recyclable. What's an example? Plastic Bag Bans: Supermarkets in many places have banned single-use plastic bags to encourage reusable ones.
Right to Repair Policies	What is it? Laws that let consumers repair things they own, like electronics, by requiring companies to provide parts and info. What’s an example? iPhones: Right to repair means you can fix your iPhone outside Apple and not lose your warranty.

Step 2

Your students' task in this Take Action is to choose one of the strategies listed and analyse how the strategy can influence the amount of litter or its impacts in a community, such as the neighbourhood they live in.

For the chosen (or assigned) strategy, students should:

explain what the strategy is and what it aims to achieve
explain whether it is a collective or individual action
provide examples of the strategy
explain how it lessens or prevents litter in a community
describe the social, environmental and economic impacts of the strategy
create a message to ‘influence’ their community to adopt the strategy.

Students can work individually or in small groups. Some starting links are provided for their research (also included in the student worksheet) but they should use these resources as a jumping off point to find out more about the social, environmental and economic impacts of the strategy. Students can use the Student Worksheet to direct their research.

Strategy	Links for research
Clean Ups	Register and learn more about running a School Clean Up. (https://www.cleanup.org.au/)
Product stewardship	Product Stewardship requires producers and retailers to take responsibility for the environmental and social impacts of products through their entire life cycle. (https://stewardshipexcellence.com.au/product-stewardship/)
Container Deposit Schemes	Container Deposit Schemes (CDS) across Australia. (https://www.cleanup.org.au/containerdepositscheme)
Plastics and packaging policies	The ban status of single-use plastics across Australia. (https://www.marineconservation.org.au/which-australian-states-are-banning-single-use-plastics/)
Right to Repair	A legal right for a product owner to have access to information, parts, and tools needed to fix products by self-repair or third-party services. (https://www.cleanup.org.au/australian-repair-network)

Step 3

Invite students to share their strategies and influencer messages to compare the different strategies and their impacts.

Reflection

Show students the images from the beginning of the lesson again using the Visual Explainer.

Prompt students to reflect on the question - ‘How can individual and collective actions like the ones we have researched today influence the environment in which we live?

Litter-ally a Better City

Summary

Lesson Guides and Printables

Litter-ally a Better City

Summary

Lesson Guides and Printables