Teaching Upcycling to Impact Environmental Attitudes

With the hope of positively impacting environmental attitudes, student interest in prototyping and product design were leveraged to create and deliver a course called Green Prototyping and Upcycling to undergraduates and graduate students. Pretest and posttest surveys with the Environmental Attitudes Inventory (Milfont & Duckitt, 2010) showed significant increases and showed no significant decreases in students’ environmental attitudes along one or more of the 12 scales in that survey. Students’ comments from their reports provided further evidence of evolving environmental attitudes. The course included several activities in which students designed and created products recycled from postconsumer materials.