Abstract:

The annual report of Mobile Economy showed that at the end of 2017, the number of single users of cell phones reached 5 billion people, although the number of SIM cards used by people was up 7.8 billion, exceeding, for the first time the whole world population. To make those kinds of devices it is necessary to extract materials of nature, that in many cases it involves the environmental sustainability of those places and several times, it is detrimental for the human rights of people who live there.

The model of economic development based on the massive exploitation of natural resources has brought to the global emergency that we currently have. There are reasonable grounds to believe that this situation has led to disastrous consequences such as deep social and economic inequalities, international conflicts for controlling natural resources, deterioration of the environment, loss of biodiversity, climate change and damages caused by natural disasters.

This crisis is an unavoidable starting point for Education for Sustainability and should be seen not only as to interpret all the above-mentioned problems but also as a reorientation of our actions to think alternatives which allow us to have the opportunity of a progressive deep transformation of the usage patterns of natural resources from sustainability criteria and social equity. In 2015 the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which has 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and there is an urgent call for worldwide people to make the transition to a more sustainable path against environmental, political and economic challenges that our planet has at the moment.

Under this scenario, a team of teachers of Health, Sustainability and Environmental Education subject of the Master Degree in Early Childhood Education of the University of Alicante, Spain, have carried out a didactical proposal for undergraduates, based on a project, in which they learn about sustainable consumption and environmental sustainability through the cell phone’s life cycle. At the end of this learning, in collaboration with the Non-governmental Organization (NGO) Alboan, they return to the population who work in coltan mines, in Congo, the money produced by broken mobile phones that they are collecting for three months at the Faculty of Education.

The issues that undergraduates have to address during this project are:
1) what materials that are needed for smartphones production, where they are extracted and what is the damage caused to the environment due to their extraction;
2) what are the consequences for the population who live in the places where the extractions of materials take place;
3) who buys those materials and if this fact produces social inequalities;
4) what is the carbon footprint from the manufacture of mobile phones to its distribution to stores;
5) when we bought those devices and if we are making a responsible consuming of them;
6) how we use this technology and social networks and what risks can we find if we don’t use them properly;
7) where can smartphones be recycled when they are broken or when we don’t need them.

This service-learning has a big impact in our students, and it makes them not only to learn in-depth about social and environmental sustainability but also to become aware of the unsustainable model of consumption that rich countries have and social inequalities and environmental damage that it causes.

Keywords:

Science education and sustainability, natural science, environmental education, sustainable development goals, pre-service teachers.