Abstract:

The quantity of waste generated in urban areas everyday claims for an effort to reduce solid wastes, through recycling and reusing. This paper presents the result of a study focused on improving and preserving the institution environment. The aim is to integrate environmental education in a higher education level, promoting the classification and reuse of materials such as: aluminum cans, Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and caps.
School is an excellent place to promote and develop the habits needed to correctly classify waste, so it can be recycled. However, if those habits are not promoted, there are many negative effects such as: surroundings deterioration, illness generation caused by bacteria proliferation and natural resources scarcity.
A sample of 144 students who were enrolled in the ethics and learning strategies course in the software engineering academic program was considered. The first step of this research had a descriptive approach to assess the student’s level of knowledge in solid waste classification and segregation.

The following topics were reviewed:
- Their common practices about how to dispose solid waste at home; either by delivering them to the garbage truck, leaving it in junk yards or burning the waste.
- Their habits in how they classified their waste, expecting that they would separate them into organic, reusable inorganic, non-reusable inorganic, toxic waste and biohazard.
- In the third section of the assessment, they were asked to classify a certain list of residuals according to the categories mentioned in the point above.

Keywords:

Sustainable development, waste sorting, containers recovery, waste management.