Preface

Growing populations and affluence around the globe have put increasing pressure on natural resources, including air and water, arable land, and raw materials. Concern over the ability of natural resources and environmental systems to support the needs and wants of global populations, now and in the future, is part of an emerging awareness of the concept of sustainability. Developing new technologies that address societal needs and wants, within the constraints imposed by natural resources and environmental systems, is one of the most important challenges of the 21st century. Engineers will play a central role in addressing that challenge.

Engineers can design products, processes, and technologies that are sustainable by integrating environmental, economic, and social factors in the evaluation of their designs. While this may seem simple in the abstract, the tools for converting sustainability concepts into the types of quantitative design approaches and performance metrics that can be applied in engineering design are just emerging. These emergent tools of designing for sustainability are the topic of this textbook.

This book begins, in Chapter 1, with a brief review of some of the details of the natural resource and environmental challenges that engineers will face in designing for sustainability. Then, in Chapters 2 and 3, analysis and legislative frameworks for addressing environmental issues and sustainability are presented. This introductory material sets the stage for common frameworks used by engineers to incorporate sustainability into their designs. This material on designing sustainable engineered systems begins in Chapter 4 with a description of the selection of green and sustainable materials, since virtually every engineering design involves some use of materials. Chapter 5 then describes a series of principles that engineers can use to make engineering designs more sustainable and tools that can be used to evaluate, and in some cases monetize, the benefits of more sustainable designs. Finally, Chapter 6 presents case studies that illustrate the principles outlined in the text.

This book grew out of the authors’ experiences in teaching methods of Green Engineering to chemical engineering students (Allen and Shonnard, 2002) and out of an understanding of emerging practices for incorporating sustainability into engineering curricula (Murphy et al., 2009). This book is designed to be an introduction to the concepts involved in designing sustainable systems, suitable for students in all engineering disciplines. The text emphasizes the economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability, since it is in these domains that quantitative tools suitable for engineering design are emerging. The social and societal dimensions of sustainability are examined, but at present, there are few tools available for explicitly incorporating societal and social objectives into engineering designs, and it is these quantitative tools that are the main focus of this text.

The book was made possible through the support of the Chemical Engineering Branch of the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the hope of the authors and our colleagues at the EPA is that it will help direct the creativity of engineers toward the design of ever more sustainable engineered systems.

—David T. Allen, University of Texas at Austin
—David R. Shonnard, Michigan Technological University

References

Allen, D. T., and D. R. Shonnard. 2002. Green Engineering: Environmentally Conscious Design of Chemical Processes. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Murphy, C., D. T. Allen, B. Allenby, J. Crittenden, C. Davidson, C. Hendrickson, and S. Matthews. 2009. “Sustainability in Engineering Education and Research at U.S. Universities.” Environmental Science & Technology 43:5558–64.