By Pip Osborne, Kaiārahi

I was making whiskey last weekend. The real stuff from grain.

For recipe insight purposes, (not for use in schools, obviously, but the recipe insight proves useful) the mash was made from corn (maize), rye, and distiller’s grain (malted barley). Once the mash process was complete, I was left staring at this enormous sack of soggy grain weighing well over 3kg.

I just didn’t want to throw it away. It sat there beside the bench while I cooked dinner, almost accusingly. I kept looking at it thinking, surely there’s another life for this stuff. 

The next morning, curiosity kicked in. A bit of searching later, I had narrowed my options down to whiskey bread, crackers, and dog biscuits. By the end of the day, all three had successful (and surprisingly delicious, because the mash looked so gross) prototypes sitting in my kitchen.

The remaining grain? That found a home in the neighbour’s newly built compost bin after a quick conversation over the fence.

Standing there with homemade bread, happy dogs, and compost-bound leftovers, I realised I can’t help myself when it comes to design thinking and sustainability. I often look at ‘waste’ as the beginning of another possibility rather than the end of a process.  

I started thinking about what this means for us as Technology educators.

In Technology education, sustainability can sometimes become reduced to a sentence in a brief, a checklist in an assessment schedule, or a paragraph students quickly write about ‘using eco-friendly materials’.  I have absolutely done this with students in the past, and it all boiled down to repetitive portfolio evidence, double glazing and solar panels with a sprinkling of water collection systems. 

But genuine sustainable thinking is much deeper than that. I realise that now.

It is about developing the capability to notice systems, identify opportunities, rethink waste, and understand the wider life cycle of products, materials, and resources.

Real sustainability education asks questions like:

What happens before a material reaches us?

What happens after we’re finished with it?

Who is impacted by the decisions we make?

What could be repurposed, regenerated, repaired, shared, or reimagined?

There is an opportunity with incredible learning potential sitting in local businesses and industries around us. Surely every community has waste streams?  I often get asked for ideas with this.  I have to say, the great thinking around learning that eventuated with MPT AS1.2 launched this curiosity with teachers.

• Cafés producing coffee grounds
• Timber yards with offcuts or construction leftovers (It pains me to see so much brand new gib board go to landfill – someone do something!)
• Wool scraps from textile industries (Or how about the hundreds of advertising flags I used to get printed for TV2 events going straight in the bin after a single use).
• Food waste from orchards or commercial kitchens (Amazing things could be made from kiwifruit, right?)
• Packaging materials, though I am yet to work out what to do with that white polystyrene stuff.

What if these waste streams became the starting point for learning?

Not just as ‘materials students can use’, but as authentic design opportunities where students investigate systems, redesign waste pathways, or create regenerative outcomes.

This is where Mātauranga Māori offers incredibly important perspectives.

Māori knowledge systems have long understood interconnected relationships between people, kaitiakitanga, whakapapa, and manaakitanga.

They provide rich lenses for thinking about sustainability beyond simply ‘recycling’.

For example, in Food Technology, ingredients can become far more than just ingredients. 

Students might investigate when certain plants should be harvested, Māori preservation practices and how local ecosystems influence food availability.

(By the way, while making another product in class we had an accidental positive outcome. I would recommend shallow frying kawakawa leaves on a low heat, so tasty with a little salt! Like a chip.  They look really pretty too as they go translucent).  

In schools, we often talk about ‘sustainability’ as reducing harm and making the planet a better place. The opportunity is to move sustainability from being a compliance exercise for an achievement standard (guilty as charged) into being a genuine design mindset.

Sometimes it begins with staring at a soggy bag of grain and simply asking:

 ‘Could this become something else?’

(We successfully distilled the fermented mash last night…. now for the baking)……