| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this research is to investigate and analyze students' awareness levels of environmental issues from the viewpoint of consumer education through the questionnaire method with factor analysis. The questionnaire consisted of 68 questions concerning students' recognition of environmental issues, their daily behavior as green consumers, information sources for environmental issues, the measures to be taken for environmental problems, and students' ideas concerning Japan's movement toward a Recycling-based Society.
The survey was conducted in December 2002 including 376 junior high school students in Aomori City and 396 in Kazo City, Saitama Prefecture, as well as 506 senior high school students in Tokyo. The results were as follows:
a) 60 to 80 % of students regard environmental problems as serious. However, excluding electrical energy-saving actions, only 10 to 20 % take the simple steps as consumers to protect and conserve their environment in their daily lives.
b) 80 % of students depend on mass media as their information sources for environmental issues while 30 to 50 % depend on the learning activities at schools.
c) Relating to the pollution control policies, 50 % of students support the regulatory approach to conserve the environment, although in society there is an increasing debate on the use of the market-based incentives to protect the environment.
d) Students have various ideas related to the movement toward a Recycling-based Society, but their images of such a society are fragmentary, as the factor analysis illustrates.
Therefore, it is becoming more important to deepen students' understanding of sustainability, and encourage each of them to have a coherent idea of what a Recycling-based Society entails and clarify the ways of living in such a society.
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