The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has awarded $133,333 to a project led by the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) that seeks to integrate circular economy concepts into high school curricula.
The initiative, titled Circular Economy for Building Design and Construction, is co-led by Associate Professor Dr. Atefe Makhmalbaf, Dr. Joowon Im, and Brad McCorkle. Running from August 2025 to August 2027, it is funded through the EPA’s Environmental Education (EE) Grant Program, which allocates more than $4 billion annually across various environmental priorities.
The project is structured around training in-service high school teachers to adopt strategies such as energy-efficient design, material reuse, and emissions reduction within the framework of circular economy (CE) principles. These methods aim to counter prevailing linear construction practices, where material extraction, use, and disposal create significant waste streams.
The project’s educational priority centers on teacher career development—equipping them with modeling and analysis tools to teach critical thinking and problem-solving in sustainability contexts. The environmental priority focuses on improving air quality by raising awareness of waste reduction and material reuse in construction.
Hands-On Application
Beyond theory, the program incorporates practical projects. Teachers and students will design and construct an outdoor structure from reused materials, measuring the environmental impacts of their design choices. This experiential approach is designed to bridge classroom instruction with tangible outcomes, reinforcing CE strategies through performance-based learning.
Workshops and exhibits will extend the program’s reach into underserved communities in Texas. These traveling workshops will allow students and parents to engage directly with CE principles, highlighting pathways for material reuse in local contexts where construction waste and air quality issues are particularly pronounced.
Building Local Capacity
The project enlists UTA faculty as mentors and mobilizes UTA students as research assistants and volunteers. Each participating teacher is expected to reach 20–30 students, creating multiplier effects as knowledge is passed from educators to classrooms and communities. While small in scale compared with systemic industry emissions, such grassroots initiatives aim to cultivate a workforce more literate in sustainable design at a time when the U.S. construction sector faces both labor shortages and rising decarbonization pressures.
EPA’s backing reflects a broader policy recognition that education is central to advancing environmental goals. Circular economy frameworks—still nascent in U.S. construction compared with European standards—rely on professional and cultural shifts as much as technological solutions. By embedding these concepts in K-12 education, projects like UTA’s seek to normalize material reuse and energy efficiency at earlier stages of the learning process.
