2008 Volume 4 Issue 3 Pages 279-291
Background and Goal. Creating a sustainable society requires changes in people’s consciousness and lifestyles in addition to the development of technologies and use of economic incentives. Environmental education has an important role to play in promoting people’s environmental awareness and responsible actions. The goal of this study is to develop teaching material that demonstrates the importance of the life cycle thinking as an important component of effective environmental education.
Methods. Focusing on the current situation where daily consumption activities are not linked, in a cognitive sense, to production activities and the natural environment, this study proposes a hypothesis that to recover the “missing links” based on life cycle thinking will contribute to an increase in pro-environmental behavior of consumers. Based on this hypothesis, environmental education material was developed that aims to make people realize the “link” between daily life and global warming through the life cycle of consumer products (e.g. mobile phones, notebooks, pens). In order to visualize and effectively recover the“ missing link”, LCA software“ Global warming even in your bag?!” that runs on a personal computer and is easy to handle was newly created as the core of the material.
Results and Discussion. The material developed was applied to an education program for university students, and a questionnaire survey was conducted to evaluate the effect. Analyses of the survey data indicated that the material is effective in making the students realize the“ link” between their daily consumption activities and global warming as well as encouraging behavioral intention towards pro-environmental behavior. In addition, the analyses found that the possibility that the realization of the “link” helps boost their sense of responsibility and improves behavioral intentions toward the carbon dioxide reduction.
Conclusions and Perspectives. The use of life cycle thinking in environmental education is considered effective in encouraging people to engage in more pro-environmental behavior. In the future, first, the authors will more appropriately measure the effects of the material developed and elucidate the mechanism of behavioral changes of students. Second, we plan to improve the material from a practical perspective, and provide a material package available for school education.
