企業によるライフサイクル思考に基づく環境授業の実践：どこから来るの？どこへ行くの？

抄録

The difficulty in encouraging environmentally-conscious actions for global environmental problems compared to those in local or regional scales is often pointed out. Why is this so? Global environmental problems differ from local or regional ones in an incomprehensibly vast amount of the resources input and wastes which affect the environment, making them difficult to link directly to our individual daily lives. Perhaps if we knew about the life cycles of the products we use every day, grasped the size of the issues, and understood the connection between global environmental problems and our individual lives, we would start to take actions that would help solve these problems. This is the reason why the author has provided environmental classes for children based on life cycle thinking since 2004. This article shall introduce two practical examples of environmental classes held in Singapore and Japan in September 2009. In the future I hope to continue to improve the contents of these classes, and to work with the cooperation of others involved in environmental education based on life cycle thinking to contribute to the general adoption of such education.