Abstract:

With the entry into force of The Agenda 2030 of the United Nations, adopted by the international community in September 2015, the sustainable development is promoted. This sustainable development is taken into account through its social, economic and environmental dimensions, so its inclusion in the agendas of Education for Development and Education for Sustainability.

The universities have an essential role in the sustainable development due to their influence on the behavior of future generations. In order to improve developed mind-sets and actions of future generations, we must provide students with a complete set of sustainability competences.

The objective of this project was to integrate in the university training and teaching of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) with freshmen students enrolled in “Chemical Principles of Engineering” in the laboratory practices, reducing the residues produced in those practices and thus contributing to the setting of the baseline of a more sustainable future.

The current work describes the actions taken in order to minimize the residues produced in this practices of laboratory. it was not necessary to change the practices, as they were just redesigned and the scripts were adapted accordingly. In order to achieve the goal the harmful reagents for the environment were substituted by others who were not; the final product of a practice was used as a reagent in another one and when none of these mentioned options were possible, students worked at a small scale in order to generate a much smaller amount of residues.

At the end of the practices, the amount of reagents consumed and the volume of residues generated were compared to those of previous years, and we concluded that, not only was there a noticeable saving, but also the duration of the experiments was shorter, resulting this in a shorter exposition of the student to the reagents, thus improving the security and hygiene in the laboratories.

The students assessed this rational approach of the practices very positively and it was confirmed that we had achieved our aim of infusing in the students environmental awareness.

Keywords:

Sustainability, motivation, reflective learning, experiential learning.