Abstract:

Transferring sustainability concepts, like the environment, climate change and waste management, to different higher education degree programmes is a complex issue. It is a challenge to engage the different branches of engineering in this issue. Our project, called Plastic-Free Forestry School, encourages Universidad Politécnica de Madrid schools to introduce measures targeting the entire academic spectrum, ranging from students to academic faculty.
The experience is based on an initiative targeting students supervised by one or two professors specializing in the environment as part of waste management courses within the BSc in Environmental Technologies Engineering, BSc in Natural Areas and Environmental Engineering and MSc in Forest Engineering, all taught at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM).
Eight students participated in the initiative. The methodology was based on inventories of the waste generated at UPM schools produced as a result of two final-year projects: one concerning recyclable waste (light packaging, paper and cardboard and glass) and another focusing on other waste. The pilot study focused on the School of Forest Engineering and the Natural Resources and the UPM’s Main Head Office.
These projects characterized the waste over a three-year period at both facilities, focusing on the components that most affect university students’ environmental education, specifically, single-use plastics. They identified the generation points outdoors (sports grounds and arboretum) and indoors (hallways and classrooms, mainly from containers brought from home, and cafeteria and offices).
After the study, students applied a series of curricular and extra-curricular strategies to raise awareness among the higher education community about minimizing consumed plastics. The aim was to reduce plastic waste generation by 80% in one year and to zero waste in two years.
The project is divided into a number of duly publicized UPM-wide activities. They included on-campus games with plastic waste held on open areas or sports grounds to disseminate the scale of the problem. Another key activity was the preparation of a good practice manual, and the organization of seminars and talks for peers and secondary school students.
The result was very encouraging in terms of the adhesion of a sizeable number of faculty members to the initiative, support received from academic authorities, the voluntary extension of the project to other schools, and an increase in interest in environmental issues from different technological courses, demanded by the students.

Keywords:

Higher education, student experiences, classroom transfer, sustainability, plastic-free university