GreenDealz: a hands-on shopping activity for public engagement with critical raw materials

Developing innovative public engagement measures are central to addressing many of the key geoscience related challenges within the EU. One of the most pressing European challenges includes achieving a sustainable and secure supply of critical raw materials (CRMs). These materials include vital metals used in renewable energy technologies, for which the EU is often totally reliant on imports at both the extraction and processing level. Hence, EU climate neutrality by 2050, as per the European Green Deal, hinges on CRM supply. However, this is not often discussed in the public realm.

Informal education spaces such as festivals provide unique environments for science communication, where incidental adult audiences can stumble upon new scientific concepts and problems in engaging ways. However, to be successful, science exhibits at such events need to capture attention and stimulate the audience in a short period of time. The critical raw material challenge is underrepresented in the festival environment likely due to historically negative public attitudes towards mining. Hence, a necessary science communication endeavour is to develop a novel engagement activity that engages adult audiences at festivals with this issue and stimulates conversation. We present a hands-on, challenge-based public engagement activity/tool for use in the fast-paced science and arts festival environment, where contact time is limited and interaction is key. Designed to simulate the supermarket experience, ‘GreenDealz’ brings participants through tactile ‘shopping’ tasks, with evaluation points included throughout. The main aim of GreenDealz was to engage participants with the concept of critical raw materials and their demand for renewable energy technologies in a relatable and task-based way.

We outline the iterative process of developing GreenDealz for the festival environment, including ideation, design, and an evolution of evaluation from classic self-reported techniques to more novel and festival friendly ‘embedded assessment’ measures. Importantly, we highlight how this activity has been tested and validated via a mixed methods approach: our quantitative data, collected across several festivals in Ireland, yields significant findings about audience learnings and engagement, while our qualitative data, gleaned through less time-restricted participant interactions sheds a deeper light on the effectiveness of this tool in achieving learning outcomes and sparking interest in critical raw materials within non-specialist audiences.