Waste Management in Mexico: key variables in play . The case of the Autonomous University of Baja California

Soil pollution, water pollution, excessive levels of noise and air pollution are phenomena present wherever human have congregated in appreciable numbers. This has been taking place for centuries. As the human population increases and its activities diversify the impact on the environment reaches new proportions and complexity. Fortunately the same human greatness for creating new forms of production and human comfort that lead to pollution is also used to try to prevent and heal the damage done to the environment or at least to slower the pace of destruction. The industrial sector has been the pioneer and the leader in implementing environmental remediation and pollution prevention measures with very good results. This trend has been taking place during the last three decades and permeates throughout other sectors that through the copying of the industrial sector scheme are taking initiatives to prevent and diminish the impacts to the environment. The education sector, specially the higher education sector, has been very active in proposing and setting-off environmental protection initiatives. The publications about diverse initiatives indicate that good results have been obtained. However, these results haven’t been obtained without hard work and troubles. Reported experiences about environmental programs at higher education institutions indicate that amongst the most common barriers for successful environmental problemsolving are the lack of environmental policies, the lack of a coordinator, and lack of financial resources. These reports however informative, lack the level of analysis that would allow suggesting deeper changes that might result in more efficient environmental programs. Other characteristic of the reported experiences of environmental initiatives in higher education is their focus on one or two variables of the internal environment of the organization.