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Design education often separates formal typography exercises from sustainability awareness, limiting students’ ability to connect visual communication with real-world environmental challenges. RE:CAN is a visual teaching aid that transforms the distinctive dents, folds, compression marks, and irregular silhouettes of discarded beverage cans into a complete display typeface for learning typography, form development, and sustainable design thinking. The project aims to help learners observe overlooked material characteristics, translate three-dimensional waste forms into two-dimensional letterforms, and apply the resulting visual system to contemporary communication. Its novelty lies in treating waste not merely as a material to be recycled, but as visual data and a creative stimulus for generating typographic structure. Through a guided process of collecting cans, observing deformation, sketching letterforms, digitising characters, refining readability, and testing branding applications, RE:CAN provides a practical pathway from environmental observation to design outcome. The teaching aid directly reflects the iTAC 2026 theme, “Breaking Barriers, Building the Future,” by breaking the barrier between waste and learning resources, between sustainability and creative practice, and between observation and digital design production. It builds future-oriented design capability by encouraging learners to view environmental problems as opportunities for responsible innovation. RE:CAN can support typography, graphic design, visual communication, and sustainability-related learning in schools, colleges, and universities. Its commercialization potential includes downloadable typeface packages, classroom activity kits, workshop modules, educational licensing, and branded creative products, enabling the project to extend from a student design exercise into a scalable teaching resource for sustainable creative education for educators, learners, and creative communities worldwide.