Supermarket Sweep for the Green Deal: Festival Toolkit Puts Critical Raw Materials in Shoppers’ Baskets

Europe’s climate ambitions rest on an uncomfortable truth: the wind turbines, solar panels and batteries that will power a carbon-neutral continent cannot be built without vast quantities of critical raw materials, from lithium and cobalt to neodymium and gallium. Yet while surveys show overwhelming public support for climate action — 87 percent of adult EU citizens want the bloc to do more on renewable energy and 86 percent want greater action on energy efficiency — the raw materials underpinning that transition remain largely absent from public conversation. A team of geoscientists and communication researchers at iCRAG, the Research Ireland Centre for Applied Geosciences, has now built a playful answer to that silence. In a pilot study published in Geoscience Communication, Lucy C. Blennerhassett, Geertje Schuitema and Fergus McAuliffe describe the iterative development of GreenDealz, a public engagement toolkit that turns festival-goers into shoppers racing to fill baskets with the elements Europe needs to hit its Green Deal targets.

The stakes are considerable. The EU Green Deal commits member states to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2030 and achieving climate neutrality by 2050, goals that hinge on scaling up renewable energy and battery technologies as fossil fuels are phased out. Under the Critical Raw Materials Act, the bloc aims by 2030 to raise domestic extraction, production and recycling of these metals and minerals to at least 10, 40 and 25 percent of annual European consumption respectively, while ensuring no critical raw material relies on a single non-EU country for more than 65 percent of its processing. Recycling alone, however, will not keep pace with surging global demand in the short term, meaning primary extraction — an activity often associated in the public mind with environmental degradation and ethical dilemmas — will remain central to the strategy. That tension makes public dialogue about supply chains, import reliance and mining impacts not merely desirable but urgent.

The researchers chose an unlikely laboratory for this conversation: the festival field. Informal education settings such as arts, cultural and science festivals offer dynamic environments where leisurely audiences can encounter technical concepts without the framing of a classroom, and previous research shows such audiences prize high levels of interactivity, hands-on participation and relaxed conversation with experts. The catch is time. For an engagement to work in a fast-paced festival setting, it must consume as little of the visitor’s time as possible while remaining attractive, informative, stimulating and fun. The team therefore set three objectives: create an eye-catching experience for potentially incidental audiences, promote genuine learning about the links between critical raw materials, decarbonisation and supply risk, and design an evaluation strategy concise enough to be, in their words, festival-friendly.

Development proceeded through three iterative phases of scoping, testing and refinement, each grounded in real-world field data. The scoping phase began at two Irish festivals: Féile na Bealtaine, a rural arts festival in Dingle, County Kerry, and the urban Cork Carnival of Science. Surveys of 32 participants in Dingle revealed high self-reported awareness of the topic overall, but notable weakness on the definition of critical raw materials and their connection to the Green Deal. When asked how they wanted to learn, 76 percent chose hands-on tasks and 66 percent wanted visual examples of the materials themselves. Open feedback echoed these preferences, with most respondents emphasising interactivity, creativity and visual stimulation, alongside a desire to understand how raw materials connect to daily life and supply chains.

Those responses shaped the first prototype, called Shopping to Decarbonise, a tabletop activity in which participants shopped for up to four key critical raw materials to build a solar panel and a wind turbine. Fifteen cubes representing different elements sat atop a periodic table, each carrying images of the pure metal or common ore and plain-language prompts about its uses — neodymium, a key material for wind energy, bore the clue spinning magnets equal electricity, while dysprosium’s prompt read maintains magnetic abilities. Trials at the Cork Carnival of Science with 22 participants confirmed the concept’s appeal but exposed a practical flaw: half of the participants dropped out before completing the 20-minute engagement and exit survey, signalling that the whole interaction simply took too long.

The testing phase transformed the prototype into GreenDealz, complete with a supermarket-style logo and a periodic table rebranded as Aisle 2050. The cubes gained barcodes so practitioners could act as cashiers, scanning shopping answers via mobile app, and import reliance data was woven into the experience through country-of-origin style labels on each cube. The number of cubes was trimmed to ten to respect festival time constraints, and a difficulty-based shopping score was introduced, awarding points for prompts rated easy, moderate or hard depending on how much critical thinking was needed to link a material to its technology. Tested at the National Ploughing Championships in County Laois — an agricultural festival drawing roughly 250,000 visitors over three days — the rebranded toolkit held attention with zero observed dropouts among the 40 consenting study participants, many of whom lingered to discuss the topic further.

Evaluation, however, proved the hardest nut to crack. A quick three-minute pre-and-post online quiz disrupted the natural flow of the engagement, and the three true-or-false knowledge items used showed reliability far below acceptable thresholds, failing to detect meaningful change. The team’s solution in the refinement phase was to embrace embedded assessment, an approach in which the evaluation tasks closely match the learning tasks of the activity itself. Three tasks were built from existing GreenDealz props: participants placed cubes representing everyday items containing critical raw materials into a basket, used cubes on a weighing scale to indicate how many times more mineral resources an onshore wind farm requires compared with a gas-fired power plant, and estimated how many of the EU’s 49 critical and strategic raw materials have import reliance above 75 percent. Scores were expressed as a ratio out of a maximum of 65.

The results were striking. Using a quasi-experimental design across three Science Week events in Ireland, the team compared GreenDealz against a control activity in which participants matched rock and ore samples to a geological map of Ireland. Baseline knowledge scores were statistically equivalent between the two groups, hovering around 0.54 to 0.58. After engagement, the intervention group’s scores jumped significantly to 0.84, a mean difference of 0.266 with a large effect size, while the control group showed no change at all. Field observations added a qualitative dimension: the embedded tasks maintained conversation between practitioner and participant, streamlined the interaction and even evoked a sense of playfulness. For the researchers, this suggests embedded assessment may be a more appropriate way to measure the effects of public engagement in festival settings than traditional survey techniques, which are vulnerable to social desirability bias and prone to interrupting the experience they are meant to evaluate.

The pooled shopping scores offered further insights into how people interacted with the material. Most participants correctly identified the materials with the easiest prompts — 90 percent chose silicon for solar panels and 72 percent chose neodymium for wind turbines — but far fewer spotted the harder connections, with only 18 percent selecting gallium for solar and 25 percent choosing dysprosium for wind. Instead, many gravitated toward lithium and titanium, materials made familiar by the battery age and popular culture respectively, hinting at how relevance and prior exposure shape engagement with geoscience. Crucially, participants working in groups achieved significantly higher shopping scores than those engaging alone, suggesting that discussion during decision-making drives deeper critical thinking — a promising finding for festivals, where people typically attend and participate in social groups, and where conversations sparked at the exhibit may ripple outward into wider social networks.

The authors are candid about the study’s limits: sample sizes were modest, participants skewed highly educated, and findings from an Irish context may not generalise to other countries or populations. Yet GreenDealz, in its current form, is a budget-friendly toolkit whose materials and guidance are publicly available, ready for practitioners who wish to open conversations about the materials behind the green transition. The team envisions future iterations ranging from full-scale gamified shopping experiences at large festivals to digital, self-paced versions, and stresses that rigorous testing of the toolkit’s broader effectiveness is the natural next step. For now, the pilot stands as a template for a pressing problem: if Europe is to mine, process and recycle its way to climate neutrality, the public deserves a seat at the table — and sometimes the most effective way to invite them is with a shopping basket, a barcode scanner and an aisle named 2050.

Subject of Research: Public engagement with critical raw materials and the EU Green Deal through an informal education toolkit

Article Title: Development of GreenDealz: a public engagement toolkit addressing critical raw materials and the EU Green Deal at informal education settings

Article References: Blennerhassett, L. C., Schuitema, G., & McAuliffe, F. (2026). Development of GreenDealz: a public engagement toolkit addressing critical raw materials and the EU Green Deal at informal education settings. Geoscience Communication, 9(2), 161-183. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-161-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-161-2026

Keywords: critical raw materials, EU Green Deal, public engagement, science communication, informal education, festivals, geoscience, embedded assessment, renewable energy, supply risk, GreenDealz, Ireland