The goal of education for sustainable development is to integrate the prinicples, values, and practices of sustainable development into all aspects of education and learning (Unesco 2008). In most cases, research in this area focused on single aspects of sustainable development such as saving energy in school buildings or the integration of reneable energy issues in vocational education and training. These are topics that are worthwile to be integrated into education, but the holistic view on vocational education for sustainability was hardly taken into consideration. In order to deal with the complexity of sustainable development, the topic needs to be dealt with in a holistic way, taking into account that action taken towards ecologic sustainability may side effects on the economic sustainability and the social sustainability measures. To integrate sustainability in vocational education (in this case, in the education of skilled workers in the recycling industry), an empirical research project in the german recycling sector is conducted. Research questions are: How do German recycling companies integrate sustainability in their daily business? Which role play skilled workers concerning different aspects of sustainability companies? Which role do management systems such as DIN ISO 14001 and EMAS play in this context? Objectives of the research are to find ways to integrate education for sustainable development into the qualification of skilled workers in the recycling sector. The overall goal is a „real integration“ which means that ESD is integrated into regular tasks and lessons by finding topics and typical work processes that are strongly linked to the intentions of ESD. As a result, he learners should be able to see that sustainable development has a lot to do with the work processes of their occupation. Conceptual framework are international documents about sustainable development as the Brundtland-report and the Agenda 21, national documents on sustainable development, international documents on education for sustainable development and international documents on vocational education for sustainable documents. For interview questions (in the case studies, interviews with employees of companies were conducted), sustainability needed to be operationalized and transformed into open interview questions. The Items defined by the Global Reporting Initiative and items definded for the recycling sector in the RecyOccupation project served as a base for operationalisation.

Research methods used were a sector analysis of the German recycling sector and case studies. The case studies were carried out in german recycling companies and included interviews with trainers, management experts, engineers and workers on the shop-floor level. In addition, observations at workplaces were conducted and literature about the companies e. g. Websites was examined. For the interviews, interview questions had to be developed by operationalisation of the three „bottom lines“ which had to be taylored for the recycling sector and for open interview questions. Theoretical backgound of the interview questions were international documents like the Brundtland report and prior research results of Spöttl and Blings (Blings/Spöttl 2003).

Results of this empirical research are that sustainable development is not a major priority theme for most recycling companies, it was difficult to find companies that were interested in cooperation for the case studies. As a contrast, most companies saw topics related to the goal of sustainable development as closely linked to leadership positions felt that this topic does not concern skilled workers (and therefore vocational education and training) much. But a result of the conducted research was that policies of companies concerning ecological or social goals affect the everyday work of skilled workers. If the skilled workers have direct contact to customers, it is very likely that the way they deal with the customers` interests affects how sustainable the company acts. A lot of activities that can be summarised under social sustainability took place in the companys, but hardly any comany saw them as part of sustainable production.