Zero Waste Object Design Competition — District Second Place

The programme behind the competition

Sıfır Atık — Zero Waste — is Türkiye’s national waste-reduction programme. It reaches schools through their local education authorities, which run activities around separating waste at source, reducing what is thrown away and recovering material that still has use.

The Zero Waste Object Design Competition is one of those activities. Students design and build an object out of material that would otherwise be discarded, and the entries are judged at district level by the İlçe Millî Eğitim Müdürlüğü.

The result

Second place in the district, 2024.

The design constraint

The interesting part of this brief is the constraint, not the theme. In a normal design exercise you choose materials to fit the object. Here the material is fixed first — whatever is at hand and was going to be thrown out — and the object has to be found inside it.

That inverts the usual order of work. Dimensions are given rather than chosen. Joints have to suit surfaces that were never meant to be joined. Strength has to be estimated from material with no datasheet. The result has to be an object somebody would actually keep, because an object nobody keeps is only a slower way of throwing the material away.

It is a small exercise, and it teaches the habit of designing to what is available rather than to what would be convenient.