Formulación de una estrategia para la gestión ambiental de residuos de aparatos eléctricos y electrónicos (RAEE) a fin de aportar en la sostenibilidad ambiental de la Universidad Santo Tomás Seccional Tunja.

Abstract

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) has currently become one of the challenges to overcome in the proper disposal of solid waste, requiring strategies that avoid the negative environmental impacts generated by its poor final disposal. Worldwide, technological advances and the commercial dynamics of manufacturing companies have caused an increase in this waste, which mostly ends up mixed in common garbage and in city landfills, in contradiction to existing regulations. The objective of this project is to be able to formulate a strategy for the environmental management of WEEE in order to contribute to the sustainability of the Tunja sectional Santo Tomás University. Likewise, it was raised as a research question: What type of WEEE environmental management strategy is the most appropriate to be used at the Tunja sectional Santo Tomás University? This corresponded to an exploratory and descriptive investigation with a mixed type approach, using qualitative and quantitative data, for which the Santo Tomás University was defined as the work unit and the Tunja section as the analysis unit, with the use of sampling with a method probabilistic and non-probabilistic, in the same way with a cross section for the moment of the beginning of the investigation. The research proposed is pertinent in the institution and will serve to improve the current environmental management of the university, which is aligned with the institutional policies related to the environment, through internal documents that include the environmental component (Universidad Santo Tomás Sectional Tunja, 2021). In the same way, these policies are in the same way as the encyclical Letter Laudato Sí' of the Holy Father Francis (The Holy See Vatican Pope Francis, 2015), on the care of the common home. Likewise, at the institutional level, it seeks to contribute to the fulfillment of the SDGs established worldwide, in all the substantive functions of the university, especially those related to objective 4 of the SDGs 2015-2030 (United Nations UN, 2022). , providing quality education, where issues in favor of environmental protection are immersed. Thus, for the fulfillment of this objective 4, the institution complies with the CNA requirements for university institutions with the inclusion of environmental aspects in the curricular development of the different undergraduate and postgraduate academic programs. The foregoing is also aligned with Decree 1076 Single Environmental Decree (República de Colombia, 2015), Law 1672 (Congress of Colombia, 2013), Decree 284 (The President of the Republic of Colombia, 2018) and the declaration of the institutional environmental policy (Universidad Santo Tomás - Sectional Tunja, 2022). In this way, with this work we sought to define a strategy for the environmental management of WEEE, so that it can contribute to the environmental sustainability of the Tunja sectional Santo Tomás University, through the identification of the current state of management and culture. of these residues in the University community, in addition to being able to select strategies for the proper management of WEEE for the social and environmental characterization of the institutional environment.