Teaching about the environment and changing behaviors

The aim of this research is to evaluate the behavio ral attitude changes in undergraduate students who receive formal environme nt education, and those who work for companies that have an environmental management sys tem. The applied methodology was based on the application of a semi-structured quest ionnaire on employees of ISO14000 certified companies that have the Environmental Man agement System, and on the universitys students from an engineering faculty in Joinville, SC, Brazil. The primary results obtained show an enhanced pro-environmental behavior of corp orate employees compared to those displayed by the surveyed students. It is evident tboth groups surveyed clearly understand that all of them are agents of environmental degrad ation and the solution to those problems is dependent on the action of all together. At this po int, the results lead to believe that the imposition of the environmental system by the compa ny foster more effective in changing pro- environmental behavior than formal education .