Greening due to environmental education? Environmental knowledge, attitudes, consumer behavior and everyday pro-environmental activities of Hungarian high school and university students

Environmental education is assumed to have a significant influence on the environmental awareness, everyday lifestyles and consumer behavior of students. Several higher education institutions have recently recognized the importance of integrating sustainability issues into education to make this impact focused and explicit. This paper explores the relationship strength between environmental education and environmental knowledge, attitudes and reported actual behavior of university and high school students, providing a comparative questionnaire survey analysis which is unique in the literature. The results show a strong correlation between the intensity of environmental education and the environmental knowledge of students. This is partly due to the environmental education itself and partly due to the higher intrinsic motivation of committed students who voluntarily participate in environmental education, primarily at university level. The focus of the environmental education appears to be important in shaping attitudes about sustainable consumption. Addressing the issue of consumerism in environmental education clearly increases awareness of the need for consumption-related lifestyle changes. Based on Multidimensional Scaling methodology, the interdependence of several influencing variables is explored and illustrated graphically. Respondents are classified into five clusters - hedonist, techno-optimist, active environmentalist, familiar and careless - according to their environmental knowledge, attitudes, consumer behavior and everyday environmental awareness. Consistencies and inconsistencies in behavior are then identified in order to promote the creation of more effective educational instruments for supporting sustainable consumption and lifestyles. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.