Empowering the next generation of sustainable designers

LIST initiative led by Tim Huber engages high-school students in circular innovation.

What if high-school students could turn discarded materials into viable business ideas? That’s precisely the ambition behind GUIDANCE, a three-year project funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and led by Dr Tim Huber, Senior Research and Technology Associate within the Functional Polymers & Particulate Materials unit at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST).

The initiative invites students from across Luxembourg to re-imagine waste as a resource and to explore the science, creativity, and entrepreneurship that drive circular design.

From New Zealand to Luxembourg: A teaching idea that grew wings

The story of GUIDANCE began far from Luxembourg. While teaching materials science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, Tim Huber faced a familiar challenge: how to make the topic engaging for design students more interested in creativity than in chemistry. His answer was to make it personal and practical.

“I asked my students to design a product made from a waste material,” Dr Huber says. “They had to research the material’s properties, propose an innovative product, and promote it through a short video.”

The idea quickly gained momentum. What started as a classroom assignment evolved into a full-fledged competition, with students pitching their ideas Dragon’s Den-style to a panel of academics and industry experts. Within a few years, several projects had grown into genuine start-ups — one even securing 3 million NZD in investment.

When Dr Huber joined LIST three and a half years ago, he saw an opportunity to adapt the same concept to Luxembourg’s education landscape — and that’s how GUIDANCE was born.

Engaging schools across the country

The GUIDANCE project officially launched in September 2024 under FNR’s PSP-Flagship programme, which supports large-scale science communication and outreach initiatives.

The project runs in three main phases, one per year. The first year (2024–25) focused on building awareness and recruiting schools to take part in what would later become known as the Trashform competition — the practical, hands-on core of the GUIDANCE project.

During this initial phase, Dr Huber and his team visited more than ten secondary schools across Luxembourg and ran half-day pilot workshops to demonstrate how the concept could work in practice. “The goal was to convince schools that this could be both educational and fun,” he said.

The second year (2025–26) marks the implementation stage, with eight schools officially joining the programme and integrating Trashform as an optional course, an extracurricular activity, or part of an existing design-related subject. Each school forms student teams who are guided through the project’s structured phases — from material research and experimentation to product design and business planning.

The third and final year (2026–27) will see the competition return in an expanded format, culminating in an international final and the creation of teaching materials that will allow schools to run Trashform independently in the future.

From waste to innovation: how it works

The Trashform challenge begins with a simple lottery: each student group draws a waste category from a hat. Options range from metals (like aluminium cans or Nespresso capsules) and plastics to biological waste (coffee grounds, fruit peels) or even tougher categories such as nappies, cigarette butts, or pizza boxes.

Once assigned their material, the students begin by researching its properties and understanding how it behaves. They then experiment with it through simple, at-home tests to explore its strength, flexibility or texture in creative ways. From there, they move on to the ideation phase, developing mood boards and analysing existing products made from similar materials to identify opportunities for improvement.

The next step is to prototype their own concept — sometimes using cardboard, clay or even 3D printing — before seeking feedback from potential users to refine their idea. Finally, they design a communication campaign to promote their creation.
In the end, Dr Huber’s team together with teachers from each participating school will select one or more finalists to compete in a national final at LIST, judged by representatives from industry, product design, and entrepreneurship. Winners will receive prize money, but the real reward, he says, is “seeing students realise they can shape the future of sustainable materials with their own hands and ideas.”

Building bridges between science, design and entrepreneurship

Beyond teaching circularity, the project aims to show students how science connects with creativity and business. “They learn not only about materials,” Dr Huber explains, “but also about problem-solving, teamwork, and communication.”

The initiative also promotes cross-border collaboration. A collaborator at the City University of Applied Sciences in Bremen, Germany, has started running a smaller version of the competition with local schools, with plans to participate in the international final in Luxembourg during the project’s third year.