How can Sustainability be rhymed with School Outings and Field Trips
Piet
van der Zanden, Delft University of Technology
The pandemic has forced schools and universities to operate with virtual situations. Scarce synchronous video calls before COVID suddenly became mainstream, direct contact hours between teacher and pupil or student were rerouted online to the home, and outings and conferences were replaced with virtual happenings when possible. In parallel, the Green AV movement shifted gear to put sustainability on the agenda as part of decision-making processes. Both have helped people tending towards a climate neutral world; however, one must be careful not to overdo because we do not want to lose important human experiences during the sustainability journey.
Being economical is
important in both education and public services. Education costs as much as the
finances that are available. Hence, budget cuts always have a direct impact on daily
quality which is translated into stretching already outdated teaching and
learning materials, and it has impact on term quantities which is negatively
resonating in a decline of physical development programmes such as playgrounds,
swimming classes and athletics.
Public services have a
large impact on the environment and are under pressure to become net-zero as
soon as possible. One and one is two, thus diminishing the number of school
outings or field trips and making less use of public services is obvious and
easy to defend if one reasons from out of a financial perspective and helping
to diminish the carbon footprint at the same time. Corroborating with these
thoughts are several studies over international academic conferences that have
shown that from out of a climate perspective the carbon footprint from virtual
participants is at least a hundred-fold up to a thousand-fold smaller than the
footprint of physical visits (Jäckle, 2021;
Periyasamy et al., 2022).
Let us take a closer
look at a particular primary school situation located in the London Borough of
Redbridge. Should they consider to exchange more physical visits with online professional
synchronised video calls done by museum delegates and professional experts. Such
online and time-saving events were already in place before the pandemic but very
positively received by both teachers and pupils when these were extended during
COVID. It surely fits with a cost saving policy, it only needs additional
evidential argumentation. Hence, a quick look into the carbon footprint of
professional virtual trips may provide such arguments.
The applied
technologies within the classroom are a computer with video and audio conferencing
capabilities to set up a Zoom call for about forty-five minutes. A large seventy-five-inch
presentation screen facilitates the thirty pairs of eyes of participating
children present in the room. That is all they need, which has an embodied
carbon equivalent footprint (CO2e) of about 430 kilograms for the computer,
1000 for the display, 150 for webcam, and perhaps another 200 for the applied
audio processor, amplifier, and loudspeakers, all to be divided over a five
years depreciation time period. Embodied
carbon equivalent footprints may be defined as the energy taken and the gasses
emitted during the mining and transportation of semi-parts followed by the
making and assembly processes to come to a finalised product. A total footprint
is the sum of embodied and energy usage during the life cycle of a product.
External experts doing
the content for the on-screen classes take care for their part of the
technology and of course the topic of their expertise. If all machineries are
running on conventional grey or nature-friendly green energy is not clear and even
so not easy to determine but the total footprint of embodied and usage carbon
footprint would probably be around 100 CO2e grams for the three quarters of an
hour Zoom call. This estimate is based on calculations from earlier studies
done by others with figures between 150 to 1000 CO2e grams per hour. This
footprint range is rapidly shifting because of technological advances in data
centres and data transmission efficiency levels (Obringer et
al., 2021), the latest calculations for several streaming
platforms come to circa 55 grams per CO2e grams per hour (Kamiya, 2020,
2025; MySquareMetre, 2024).
Transportation emissions
in the UK are doing well since halving the emissions in 2023 compared to the
levels of 1990 as is referenced on the Statista website (Tiseo, 2024c). Still transportation is a huge polluter. The
latest carbon footprint figures indicate that an average local bus takes 108.5
grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilometre, however, the National Rail
takes 35.5 grams, a Coach does 27.2 grams and the Tube has an average of 24.7
grams per kilometre these days (Tiseo, 2024b). Talking about the embodied carbon footprint that
represents the making and assembly of coaches and trains is just undoable. Producing
trains and buses and infrastructure have over tens of thousands of tons CO2e
numbers and are beyond any compare considering simple videoconferencing systems.
Hence, only a comparison is done for the energy footprint.
The table hereunder lists
the primary school case with three different outings and the CO2e numbers found
for transportation versus virtual appearance. It lists the time of travel with its
distance and estimated footprint. Costs for extra (voluntary) staff necessary
to safeguard the children is not mentioned, think about an average of one guard
per six children in public transports and one every ten children when
travelling by coach. These extra costs are probably in balance with the costs
of hiring online experts for the virtual presentations.
|
School
return trip |
Museum
|
Type
of transport |
Travel Time return trip [min] |
Travel Distance return trip [mi] or [km] |
Carbon Footprint transport [kg] |
Carbon Footprint 45 minutes VC
[kg] |
|
London
Borough of Redbridge |
Yorvik Viking Centre in York |
National
Rail or Train |
3 hr 15mins one way 6 hr 30 mins |
414
miles 667
km |
35.5 * 667 = 23.7 |
0.1 |
|
London
Borough of Redbridge |
National Space Centre in Leicester |
Coach
|
2 hr 20 mins one way 4 hr 40 mins |
240
miles 386
km |
27.2 * 386 = 10.5 |
0.1 |
|
London
Borough of Redbridge |
National
Archives in London |
London
Subway or Tube |
1 hr 20 mins one way x 2 2
hr 40 |
48
miles 77
km |
24.7 * 77 = 1.9 |
0.1 |
*) Specific numbers for Trams in UK were not found. An
average is 28 grams per passenger kilometre (Tiseo, 2024a)
Although the table
shows indicative figures only, it is quite clear that virtual presentations on
a straightforward video conferencing system with an external expert on a TV
screen have a very small cost price and minimal CO2e footprint compared to
whatever means of transport. Such numbers are evidence enough for deciding to
cut school outings from annual terms to save costs and do positive for the
environment.
Stop right here! Are we not on a wrong way of reasoning? Consequently,
one may close all museums which saves enormous amounts of money. Money that can
be spend on housing and wages and education. In this way one may reason all
sorts of cost savings, but please, let us contemplate a bit.
Online alternatives
might imitate real-life experiences, but virtual synchronous video calls can never
evenly match a real-life school trip. The challenge however is to value personal experiences, how can such
important human experiences be expressed in hard currency to give it value to
counter the above reasoning. The costs of virtual school trips compared to
physical ones is just an uneven match.
Sometimes it is
possible to make obvious but hard to grasp things tangible. As an example, one
may calculate virtual costs in the case education fails due to a classroom fall-out.
Of course, it is a challenge to decompose all the separate parts such as fee,
energy, purchase, etcetera, so it is much easier to take an imaginable
calculation unit and pretend that education costs only one pound per seat per
student per hour. A three-hundred-seater lecture hall already comes up with 8
hours x 300 seats is 2400 Pounds per day. A higher pound rate should be very
reasonable and create acceptance when one wants to invest for instance in
better maintenance sequences. At the least, such tangible numbers help to start
the discussion into valuing experiences.
Virtual school trips can
certainly add experiences that otherwise could not be attained in the real
world. For instance, deep sea visits or space voyages are just not possible,
but children’s imagination may be helped with all sorts of digital AV-IT tools
such as augmented, virtual, and extended realities that make experiences quite
realistic. Haptic experiences in virtual and immersive scenarios may help to improve
motoric skills and eye-hand coordination, much more than just watching screens which
seems to be more addictive every day and not only for children. Kids have so
much screen time these days, still extended realities may really dive into
methods and techniques that are positioned higher on Bloom’s authentic six
levels learning ladder of Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis,
Synthesis, up to Evaluation (Anderson et
al., 2000; Bloom, 1956).
Sustainability is hot
and virtual sessions are quite easy to organise, but it kills school trips when
calculating only with money and not valuing the real-life experience. Consider
examples such as an Olympian swim champion talking about her training and hard
work and things that were achieved. Such will give positive energy vibes to
children, but they cannot swim just by that story, they can only be made
enthusiastic. Real life experiences come when they enter the water, feel the
resistance, and try to float, when they start training to experience similar
feelings as the Olympian swimmer talked about. The same counts for future
museum visits that were once presented on screen in school. Imagine that you finally
enter the Yorvik Viking Centre in York where memories from your earlier years
on primary school are to be exchanged for true life immersion.
Do things oneself that
are able to be done by oneself despite the larger carbon footprint and add
virtual experiences with or without the haptics to practice things that cannot
be done in the real world or are not feasible due to larges distances or too
much time-taking travels.
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