Overview
Newt (New Texas) is a community project in San Marcos, Texas, to increase climate action education. Everyone from children to adults can participate in Newt’s plastic drive. Donate plastic to the drive to reach the goal of creating new public spaces, like a park or art installations. Newt hopes to educate people on how climate change and resource scarcity is affecting our planet.
Group school project (12 weeks)
Approach
Collaborating with students from Oulu University of Applied Sciences in Finland, Texas State University students (a mixture of honor college students and design majors) created a project dedicated to educating the public on Megatrends. Our group chose climate change and resource scarcity. We decided to create multicolored recycle bins to collect different materials to build public attractions. Researching and seeing the perspectives of the Finland students helps Newt go from a community-level project to a worldwide project.
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Roles
Belinda Hardaway - art direction, design research, illustrations, research, prototyping, UX/UI, and visual design lead
Afaf Alnahas - design research, illustrations, research, prototyping, UX/UI lead, and visual design
Jackson Barr - conceptualizing, copywriting, and research
Lucero Hernandez - conceptualizing, copywriting, and research
for more details on my portion of the project, check out my medium!
Global plastic production has increased from 2 million to 360 million tonnes between 1950-2018. It has continued to increase in 2019 and onward due to COVID-19 and single-use plastics.
Currently, the United States handles recycling differently depending on your area. Some may send a truck to pick it up or you may have to drive to your local recycling center.
Newt plans to take notes from Finland and apply them to help communities in the United States. Finnish people were taught at a young age how to clean, sort, and recycle their trash.
There are many problems that result from climate change. The global economy can suffer under resource scarcity, animals can lose their habitats, and Lyme disease can spread from the melting glaciers. The topic of climate change is too large, so we wrote, "How Might We..." statements to narrow down and focus on a specific area.
Team Newt asked people around the Texas State campus as well as friends and family about their understanding of climate change and recycling.
Out of a sample size of 32 people, a majority of them understand where the issues of climate change emerge, but do not know the sustainable habits necessary to address these issues.
