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Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................. 4
Environmental Ethics for Engineers...................................................................... 4
Current Global Environmental Issues ................................................................... 7
The Sustainability Concept .................................................................................... 8
Some General Approaches .................................................................................. 10
Life Cycle Analysis .............................................................................................. 10
Cradle to Cradle .................................................................................................. 10
Zero Waste Engineering ...................................................................................... 10
Conclusions .......................................................................................................... 11
Reference List ....................................................................................................... 12


4
Introduction
The main functions of engineers along history have been designing and developing
technical solutions to the needs of the society or the industry, throughout
transformations of scientific principles and theorems, considering given limitations and
constrains. However, the global issues and changes we are currently facing impose
new challenges for engineers, beyond of the mere application of existent technical
solutions to particular problems.
Some of these changes are consequences of pollution and affectations to the
environment caused by the solutions developed during the last century by engineers
in performance of their duties. This leads to ask the following questions: Is the
environment a concern for engineers? If so, why, and what can be done about it? What
is the role for an engineer?
This report is an attempt to answer those questions by exploring and relating the
thoughts of different authors to briefly describe the significance of environmental
aspects in the performance of successful engineers nowadays.
Firstly, some codes of engineering ethics have been investigated in order to state and
clarify the required values and principles associated to environmental protection, then
those principles have been linked to the current global environmental issues with the
purpose of describing possible actions that should be taken by engineers to guarantee
a sustainable development. Finally, it has been shortly referred some technical
approaches for sustainable development and environmental protection, whose
implementation depends on engineering innovation.
Environmental Ethics for Engineers
An engineering code of ethics establishes a frame of values and principles within
which the decisions made by engineers should be, to ensure that their tasks are made
in a decent manner. Those codes have gone developing at the same time of the
development of the engineering itself, in order to accommodate current issues that
may affect the engineering practice. This is how, in this day and age, the environmental
issues play a significant role in the conception of those principles and values.
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Thus, for example, all members of Engineers Australia are committed to performance
their duties in accordance with its code of ethics and therefore in the course of
engineering practice they will have to meet four major precepts (Engineers Australia,
2010): demonstrate integrity, practise competently, exercise leadership, and promote
sustainability.
This last precept refers to the values and principles related to the environment that are
expected from engineers according to the above code of ethics, and it has been broken
down into the following guidelines:
1. Participate responsibly with the community and other stakeholders, being
sensitive to public concerns, informing of the possible consequences of
proposed activities on the community and the environment, and promoting the
involvement of all stakeholders and the community in decisions and processes
that may impact upon them and the environment.
2. Practise engineering to foster the health, safety and wellbeing of the community
and the environment, incorporating social, cultural, health, safety,
environmental, and economic considerations into the engineering task.
3. Balance the needs of the present with the needs of future generations, in
identifying sustainable outcomes and considering all options in terms of their
economic, environmental and social consequences. Aiming to deliver outcomes
that do not compromise the ability of future life to enjoy the same or better
environment, health, wellbeing and safety as currently enjoyed.
In turn, the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO) recently purposed
for consideration by the governing and registering organizations of engineers, a more
detailed code of practice for sustainable development and environmental stewardship
(2013a), which is intended to clarify the link between ethics and engineering practice
by considering engineering in the context of sustainability. The ten principles contained
in that code can be summarized as following:
1. Understand and be aware of environmental stewardship, sustainability
principles and issues related to the field of practice.
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2. Use the skills of others in the areas where the own expertise is not adequate to
address environmental and sustainability issues.
3. Incorporate cross-cultural values applicable to the work, including local and
community concerns, and quality of life and social concerns related to
environmental impacts.
4. Implement sustainability principles at the earliest possible stage using
applicable standards and criteria associated to sustainability and the
environment.
5. Evaluate costs and benefits of environmental protection, eco-system
components, and sustainability, as part of the economic viability of the work,
with appropriate consideration of climate change and extreme events.
6. Incorporate environmental stewardship and sustainability planning into the
planning and management of activities that impact the environment,
implementing efficient and sustainable solutions.
7. Try to find innovations that recognize environmental, social, and economic
factors, contributing to healthy environments in both the built and natural
surroundings.
8. Develop engagement processes for stakeholders, both external and internal,
soliciting their contribution in an open and transparent manner, and respond to
all concerns in a timely fashion in ways that are consistent with the scope of the
assigned work. Disclosing needed information to the appropriate authorities in
order to protect public safety.
9. Guarantee that projects follow the regulatory and legal requirements and
endeavour to exceed those requirements by the application of the best available
and economically viable methodologies, technologies and procedures.
10. In case of threats of serious or irreversible damage, with lack of scientific
certainty, risk mitigation measures have to be applied in time to minimize
environmental degradation.
7
It can be clearly seen that among the ethical considerations of engineering practice,
there is a consensual component concerned to the protection of the environment to
ensure its sustainability for the future generations, with which engineers are implicitly
committed as members of the different engineering bodies around the world.
Therefore, the real challenge for engineers is how this concern should be addressed
or implemented in order to perform a real environmental stewardship.
Current Global Environmental Issues
Global warming and its effect on climate change are the environmental issues of our
day and age, everyone knows or at least has heard about them and their global
impacts. The main cause of global warming are greenhouse gas emissions (GHG),
principally carbon dioxide, and as it has been reported by Kanga (2007) the foremost
culprits sectors are, in their order of responsibility as percentage of total GHG, power
generation (24%), transport (14%), agriculture (14%), industry (14%), and buildings
(8%).
Even though, it is believe that the actions we do today will not have a large effect on
the climate, the actions taken during the next 20 years will affect considerably the
future climate. In consequence, the basic elements of human life around the world,
such as access to fresh water and food production, may be menaced by climate
change during this century (Kanga, 2007). Therefore, the actions to reduce GHG have
to be understood as an essential task to guarantee human life around the world.
Some of the significant measures are for instance, the scheme purposed by different
governments to impose greater taxation to those sectors and companies whose GHG
are greater, so that they are encouraged to reduce their emissions in order to reduce
their production cost; or the denominated carbon trading, in which companies are
allowed to have a maximum amount of GHG, and so that they are encouraged to
improve their performance in order to rise their production with the same allowed
amount of GHG. In consequence, companies need to invest in alternative technologies
to survive in the market.
This is where engineers play a determinate role, as they are the professionals with the
skills required to develop and to implement those alternative technologies or to adapt
8
existent technologies to reduce GHG emissions, which is also recognized by different
analysts such as Kevin (2010) and Kanga (2007). Thus, for example, electrical and
mechanical engineers need to develop alternative means of power generation and
improve the efficiency of energy consumer devices, civil engineers have to be able to
design and implement eco-friendly buildings, infrastructure and transportation
systems, chemical engineers should develop more efficient solutions for chemical and
petrochemical industries, and mining engineers are required to solve the problems
related to the extraction and processing of minerals. Engineering skills are required
now as never before to address the challenging that the mitigation of climate change
implies.
Besides the reduction on the emission of carbon dioxide, which is only one of the
actions that can be taken by many companies, in the same direction, actions to
mitigate the additional environmental affectations due to production processes should
be also addressed by engineers in order to reduce those impacts, establishing a
competition on sustainability among companies. Under this approach of competition
on sustainability our planet will be the big winner (Douglas, Papadopoulos, & Boutelle,
2010).
The Sustainability Concept
This part summarizes some basic concepts of sustainability and environmental
stewardship according to the WFEO (2013b) in order to conclude with some of the
actions that should be taken by engineers to ensure a sustainable development.
The concept of sustainability is relatively recent, and the awareness and
understanding of it is still low across some societies (WFEO 2013b); as well as the
integration of its concepts to the engineering practice has been challenging due to the
fact that it is difficult to defined exactly what must be done versus what should be done
by engineers regarding to environmental protection. In others words, as engineering
organizations are created to promote also different aspects of development in their
own countries, such as productivity and economic growth, establishing rigorous
environmental protection rules may be against of the accepted model of economic
progress.
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Even though the different views around the world, the WFEO has adopted a general
definition of sustainable development that is considered by this organization as the
broadest, best known and most widely accepted:
Sustainable development is development that meets the social, economic, and
environmental needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their needs.
Based on the generally accepted fact that the future of human existence in earth will
depend on quality and health of the environment over the long term, and on the idea
of stewardship, which means the need of caring things even if you are not its owner;
it has emerged the concept of environmental stewardship, as the concept of
maintaining a healthy environment, this concept has been defined by the WFEO
(2013b) as:
Environmental Stewardship is the prudent use of the finite resources in nature
to produce the greatest benefit while maintaining a healthy environment for the
foreseeable future.
As it is suggested by the WFEO (2013b), over the long-term the wellbeing of our
societies and its economies depends on the health of the environment. Moreover, a
sustainable development is not totally possible without impacts to the environment,
neither an environmental stewardship is totally possible without costs to the economy.
In order to protect and preserve the environment, society must be able to afford to do
it. Therefore, sustainable development and environmental stewardship must be part
of our decision making. It seems reasonable then that without environmental
stewardship there is no sustainable development and that without sustainable
development there is no way to afford environmental stewardship.
Finally, although engineers most of the times are not the definitive decision makers,
their challenge is to change and innovate the practices and technologies involved in
the processes aimed to satisfy society needs, in such a way that their performance is
as near as possible to the concept of sustainable development explained above, being
capable of identifying the real society needs rather than the wants. In addition, there
is an educational task, as some clients may not know about sustainable alternatives
when scoping a new project (WFEO 2013b).
10
Some General Approaches
It is presented below a brief description of three technical approaches for sustainable
development and environmental protection, whose implementation depends on
engineering innovation, these are: life cycle analysis according to Douglas et al.
(2010), cradle to cradle according to McDonough and Braungart (2002), and zero
waste engineering according to Khan and Islam (2012).
Life Cycle Analysis
Called by some people as cradle to grave, this is a pragmatic approach in which it is
evaluated the potential environmental impact of any product, process or activity, over
its whole life cycle, throughout the quantification of the resources required for its
development (inputs such as energy, raw materials, water) and the respective
emissions to the environment (outputs to the air, water and soils).
Cradle to Cradle
This approach looks beyond of the efficiency of systems based on the idea that the nature
does not produce any waste, and therefore any system created by human must be like
that to ensure a real sustainable development. In this vision all the materials involved are
seen either as technical nutrients that are unlimited reusable by society or as biological
nutrients that are decomposable by nature.
Zero Waste Engineering
It is a similar approach to cradle to cradle in the basis of that nature does not create waste
and that any technology that conflicts with natural behaviours will not be sustainable. The
main objective of Khan and Islam (2012) in their book is to deconstruct the phenomenal
assumptions behind numerous 'laws' and numerical solution schemes that are touted as
the only solutions to engineering problems and to develop a design evaluation framework
that combines energy technologies with mass and energy efficient techniques to create a
new generation of zero waste mass and energy efficient life styles. In an ideal, zero waste
scheme, the products and by-products of one process are used for another process
11
Conclusions
As every ethical issue, environmental ethics has a vast philosophical background that
sometimes makes difficult to distinguish the border between bad or good choices,
being this kind of decisions even more challenging for engineers due to the fact that
most of the times there are additional decisive factors that may be considered as more
important, relegating the environmental responsibility to a simple compliance of lax
laws and regulations. However, while the consensual model of development remains
oriented to growth, and to be successful as engineers we have to work as part of that
model, the codes of ethics of national engineering organizations, such as Engineers
Australia, are the best options to harmonize our engineering practice with its
environmental impacts.
It was showed that the environment is not only a concern for engineering, but also it
is an immeasurable source of motivation for innovation, and that requires as never
before the dynamic participation of engineers with the ability to design and implement
solutions for the present needs without compromising the amount and quality of the
resources needed for future generations.
Engineers may be proactive and work to apply rigorous and exigent visions of
sustainability such as cradle to cradle or zero waste engineering, however it is
generally recognized that most of the times engineering practice may be limited in its
temporal scope and its external constrains, making even more difficult the application
of those concepts. In these cases, engineers need to make sure that they still practice
environmental stewardship, reducing environmental impacts of their performance as
much as they can.


12
Reference List
Douglas, D., Papadopoulos, G., & Boutelle, J. (2010). Citizen engineer. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Engineers Australia. (2010). Code of Ethics. from
https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/ethics
Kanga, M. (2007). Climate Change - The Role for Engineers. Paper presented at the
12th APEC Women Leaders's Network Meeting.
Kevin, T. (2010). The Role of Engineers in Framing National Policy Responses to
Australia's Climate Crisis. Australian Journal of Electrical & Electronics
Engineering, 7(2), 195-201.
Khan, M. M., & Islam, M. R. (2012). Zero Waste Engineering. Hoboken: Wiley.
McDonough, W., & Braungart, M. (2002). Cradle to cradle: remaking the way we
make things. New York: North Point Press.
World Federation of Engineering Organizations. (2013a). Code of Practice for
Sustainable Development and Environmental Stewardship. from
http://www.wfeo.net/wp-content/uploads/code-of-
practice/WFEOModelCodePractice_SusDevEnvStewardship_One_Page_Pub
lication_Draft_en_oct_2013-3.pdf
World Federation of Engineering Organizations. (2013b). Code of Practice for
Sustainable Development and Environmental Stewardship - Interpretive
Guide. from http://www.wfeo.net/wp-content/uploads/code-of-
practice/WFEOModelCodePractice_SusDevEnvStewardship_Interpretive_Gui
de_Publication_Draft_en_oct_2013.pdf