Summary
I see sustainable development as the most crucial issue facing society today. Engineering for sustainable development means providing for human needs without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their needs. That is essentially the formal explanation of sustainability, and forms the basis of this blog by coining together the terms "Sustainable + Chemical Engineering". It is to show how different aspects of engineering, specifically chemical, can be sustainable.
The impact of industry on sustainability covers the three pillars of development - environmental responsibility, economic growth (which is feasible) and social development (acceptance by society). For industry to guide its activities towards greater responsibility, more engineers needs to have tools to assess the operations with which they are concerned. Chemical engineers can look at sustainability performance indicators as published by IChemE which will partly help them address issues, set targets and develop internal benchmarking.
The Need For Sustainable Engineering
Society today must face the question of whether it can sustain opportunity and freedom and quality of life without compromising one for the other. Engineers, who design the means by which society provides for its needs, must have an especially clear grasp of the question.
Many serious challenges confront our world, and we keep hearing about predictions of disaster. But the future is not an inevitability; it is a choice. We do not face disaster unless we make disastrous choices. Engineers bear a special responsibility to inform society regarding the practical implications of its choices. Therefore, those who educate engineers bear a special responsibility to ensure that engineering students develop a meaningful basis for judging the practical implications of social tendencies and choices.
Society has valued industrial technology because society has perceived industry as offering choices. At the same time, industry has created problems we can no longer avoid. The list is familiar: acid rain, toxic waste, greenhouse effect, resource exhaustion, etc. Some people insist that to maintain the benefits of industry, we must continue designing and using technology in the same outmoded and increasingly dangerous way. Those who believe instead that the future is a choice know we can fully understand our alternatives only through more realistic engineering analysis creating the basis for a new engineering that offers genuine technical and social alternatives responsive to actual needs.
Resource issues have perhaps the broadest practical implications of any we face, as engineers. Traditional industrial technology has always depended on sheer volume of resources to overwhelm problems, and engineers have always been trained to think along those lines. In the face of limits becoming obvious today, the old industrial paradigm of unlimited growth is unsustainable, since it requires unlimited drawdowns of limited planetary resource storages, and unlimited environmental capacity to absorb externalities. Engineering conceived in terms of that paradigm is likewise unsustainable. What we need is an entirely new paradigm for the way we design industrial technology, and that paradigm is sustainability. To achieve sustainability, we need sustainable engineering.
*Based on an article by Peter Hartley (1993) called "Sustainable Engineering", for more in dept analysis of calculating resource load carrying capacity, click here.
