Incorporating Sustainability and Green Design Concepts into the Engineering and Engineering Technology Curriculum and Programs

Abstract

Incorporating Sustainability and Green Design Concepts into the Engineering and Engineering Technology Curriculum and ProgramsHuman society is facing an uncertain future due to the present day unsustainable use of naturalresources and the growing imbalance with our natural environment. The creation of a sustainablesociety is a complex multi-disciplinary, multi-stage endeavor that will dominate twenty firstcentury. Sustainable development means industrial progress that meets the needs of the presentwithout compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It is importantfor all of us to incorporate sustainable product and process engineering, green and lean design,green manufacturing, assembly system and factory management concepts, rules and principlesinto our engineering and engineering technology courses, making the issue of sustainabledevelopment one of the main priorities of our time. There is a need to instill sustainabilityawareness and concepts among the younger generation to ensure sustainable production can beachieved in the near future. The current practice of society is obviously unsustainable, reflectedby those major issues on population growth, energy consumption, environmental issues, andresource depletion. Sustainability has four basic aspects: the environment, technology, economy,and societal organization. Conventionally, engineers are taught to deal with technologydevelopment and economic analysis to assess the viability of a process, a product, a process or aproject. They are not familiar with the optimization of the human benefits from the technologydevelopment and the environment where materials and energy are available. However, schoolswith undergraduate engineering or engineering technology programs are working to includeenvironmental sustainability and sustainable design into their curricula. Teaching sustainabilityand green design in engineering or engineering technology curricula has increasingly become anessential feature of the present day education. Sustainable engineering is about design thatrecognizes the constraints that are applied by natural resources and the environmental system. Itapplies to all of engineering, as all engineered systems interact with the environment in complexand important ways. The needs for engineering students and practicing engineers to understandsustainability concepts and concerns have been noted by many educators and scientists. Themain goals of our project are to provide the students with multiple and comprehensive exposures,to what it mean to have a sustainable mindset and to facilitate the development of the passionand the skills to integrate sustainable practices into engineering tools and methods. In this studywe are describing our approaches to incorporating sustainability and green design into ourundergraduate curricula and to list a variety of existing resources that can easily be adopted oradapted by our faculty for this purpose. Our approaches are: (1) redesigning existing coursesthrough development of new curricular materials that still meet the objectives of the originalcourse and (2) developing upper division elective courses that address specific topics related tosustainability, such as green design, green manufacturing or life-cycle assessment, in depth.