
Digitalization and Environmental Problems
The world made 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022 and recycled 22% of it. Five days on the digital tools that help — and the ones that are the problem.
About this course
Every push to “go digital for the environment” carries a footnote it rarely mentions: the devices themselves are not free. The Global E-waste Monitor recorded 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022 and found that only 22% of it was documented as properly collected and recycled — with the total rising about five times…
Methodology
The week follows the four competence areas of the European sustainability competence framework in the order the framework sets them, so each day builds on a named capability rather than a topic heading.
Environmental claims are checked against real instruments — satellite imagery, air quality data, biodiversity records — rather than discussed in the abstract.
The environmental cost of digital technology is examined on the objects participants and their students already own, not on distant industrial examples.
Projects built during the week close with an attempt to falsify their own environmental claim, which is how a classroom project survives contact with a sceptical student.
What you'll take home
Use the four GreenComp areas as a common vocabulary for what a sustainability-competent learner can do, and locate your own lessons within them.
Explain where a digital device's environmental cost sits across its life, from materials to disposal, using current e-waste figures rather than impressions.
Read environmental evidence for your own locality using Copernicus satellite imagery, European air quality data and citizen-science biodiversity records.
Separate an environmental claim that evidence supports from one that only sounds right, and teach students to do the same.
Identify what a teacher, a class and a school can each realistically change about the devices they use, and what the EU repair rules now entitle a consumer to.
Leave with a class project on digitalization and environment, and with the record of what happened when the group tried to break its central claim.
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What's included
Not included
Aggregated across all EMA courses, not specific to this session.
+ educators from 19 more countries across Europe and beyond
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