Sustainability Project Universidad Nacional Ecológica The National Ecological University in Santa Cruz – Bolivia is a young higher education institution; it has just celebrated their ten years anniversary. The most significant thing that my university has done is to include a subject denominated “Ecology and Environment” in every professional career (Medicine, Biochemistry Pharmaceutics, Physiotherapy, Nursing, and Food Engineering, among others). All of the students have to pass this subject at least seven months in the entire five years of study, being this our seal as an Ecological University. I think that it could be very beneficial for other universities too, to implement such a subject, “Ecology and Environment”, because the environmental problems will affect every field in the society, not only those people who actually study Environmental Engineering or Biology. Another interesting thing in my university is what we call “Ecological hours”. Throughout the five years of study every student has to pass 100 Ecological hours, with projects generated by the students and teachers that benefit the community. Some months ago we started a campaign in the schools to recollect batteries that normally are being launched with the kitchen garbage. In the month of May the students participated in a water project. They went to the schools and different “barrios” to control the water quality and talked with the children of the importance of prevent water pollution.
Campaign with the slogan; ”we don´t use thousand of bottles on time, we use one bottle thousand of times”. Students from the Environmental Engineering study.
Students are passing ”ecological hours” in benefit of the community. Here some students went to suburban schools to check for an eventual pollution in the water.