1) The document discusses the relationships between sustainable engineering, green chemistry, and green engineering. While there is overlap, each concept addresses environmental stewardship from a slightly different perspective.
2) Sustainable engineering seeks to address environmental, economic, and social issues simultaneously. It emphasizes improving quality of life for all people without compromising future generations' abilities to meet their needs.
3) The paper was presented at a conference to further discussion of more holistic and quantitative approaches to analyzing sustainability challenges from technical and broader perspectives.
1) The document discusses the relationships between sustainable engineering, green chemistry, and green engineering. While there is overlap, each concept addresses environmental stewardship from a slightly different perspective.
2) Sustainable engineering seeks to address environmental, economic, and social issues simultaneously. It emphasizes improving quality of life for all people without compromising future generations' abilities to meet their needs.
3) The paper was presented at a conference to further discussion of more holistic and quantitative approaches to analyzing sustainability challenges from technical and broader perspectives.
1) The document discusses the relationships between sustainable engineering, green chemistry, and green engineering. While there is overlap, each concept addresses environmental stewardship from a slightly different perspective.
2) Sustainable engineering seeks to address environmental, economic, and social issues simultaneously. It emphasizes improving quality of life for all people without compromising future generations' abilities to meet their needs.
3) The paper was presented at a conference to further discussion of more holistic and quantitative approaches to analyzing sustainability challenges from technical and broader perspectives.
Environmental Progress (Vol.23, No.4) December 2004 261
efforts to provide a more complete picture of the chem- ical challenges of sustainability. It is clear that the issues of energy efficiency, minimization of hazardous wastes, decreased use of solvents (either through solvent re- placement or through increased solvent recycling), and many others that address technical issues of sustain- ability rest in the area of green chemistry and green engineering. The convergence of these programming efforts represents a significant development for the sustainability community. The papers included within this special issue of Environmental Progress have been taken from many of the sessions organized by the SEF for the AIChE 2003 Figure 1. Relationship between green chemistry, Annual Meeting, and represent a cross section of those green engineering, and sustainability. [Color figure that were presented at the meeting. In developing this can be viewed in the online issue, which is available issue, special effort was made to go beyond green at www.interscience.wiley.com.] engineering and place the technical challenges into a sustainability context. This point is brought to light in the contribution from Michael Heusseman of PNNL (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), who makes it istry addresses issues of natural capital, and green en- clear that the challenges of sustainability are more gineering addresses both natural capital and economic widespread than those that an engineer can address. viability, sustainability also addresses the human con- Although he agrees that technical improvements will dition and implores the individual to improve the qual- lead to decreasing environmental impact, he also ity of life for all habitants. points out that increasing GDP and population can Although engineers and scientists have been con- counteract the effects of these improvements. The con- cerned about environmental matters since the early tribution is presented as the author’s opinion, and 1970s, and green chemistry and engineering became should not be construed as the general opinion of the prevalent in the 1990s, only today are we getting to the technical community, which generally agrees that ad- point in which we can be quantitative in our analysis. vances in ecoefficiency are essential as society attempts Researchers are defining sustainability metrics that at- to move toward sustainability. tempt to capture various performance metrics into a A more optimistic assessment of the state of develop- single parameter. For example, the ecological footprint ment is presented in the contribution from Beth Beloff measures the amount of land area required to support and her collaborators at Bridges to Sustainability, who the lifestyle of the average citizen, accounting for con- point out that industry is making substantial progress in sumption of both natural resources and energy [4]. the development of sustainable processes. A complemen- Today, green engineering has become a major pro- tary analysis is offered by Mary Ann Curran, who illus- grammatic emphasis in the American Institute of Chem- trates some of the life-cycle assessment tools now avail- ical Engineers (AIChE), just as green chemistry has able to industry and demonstrates how they can be been a major programmatic emphasis in the American applied. Additional contributions provide new develop- Chemical Society (ACS) for the last 5 (or so) years. ments in life-cycle assessment, describing recent ad- Within AIChE, green engineering efforts are coordi- vances and the application of these new techniques to nated through the Sustainable Engineering Forum industrial processes. Charlene Wall, of BASF, goes one (SEF), created in 2002, “to serve as an international step further in her contribution, providing a more com- forum and to promote information exchange, scholar- plete example based on ecoefficiency analysis. ship, research and education in the application of the One of the principles espoused uniformly in green principles of sustainability and sustainable develop- chemistry, green engineering, and sustainability is that ment to engineering in general, and chemical engineer- of the use of renewable resources as a basis for the ing in particular” [5]. Within ACS, substantial efforts production of energy and for industrial processes. As exist within the Industrial and Engineering Chemistry illustrated by the scope of these papers, several oppor- Division, working with the Green Chemistry Institute to tunities exist for the use of renewable resources, in- address many of the wide-ranging issues of green cluding as a raw material for the production of chem- chemistry. icals, use as a transportation fuel, or use as an Symposia organized by both ACS and AIChE often alternative construction material. Each opportunity can focus on technical questions that surround green chem- be optimized for a specific resource, based on its own istry and engineering, but often do not approach a set of productions parameters. This special issue high- similar level of attention for the issues of sustainability. lights the importance of renewable resources through Together, these two programming groups represent a the final three papers in the issue, all of which provide large percentage of the scientific discussion on the a systems analysis for the use of renewable resources. issues and challenges facing the chemistry and chemi- The papers selected for this issue represent a small cal engineering community as it tries to meet the sus- subset of those papers presented at the 2003 AIChE An- tainability challenge. In recent years, there has been nual Meeting, and all of those papers represent a subset of considerable interest in integrating these programming the total number of contributions made within any given
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year. The large number of publications focused on green LITERATURE CITED chemistry and green engineering and the proliferation of 1. Anastas, P.T., & Warner, J.C. (1998). Green chemis- new journals that focus on these research areas exemplify try : Theory and practice, Oxford, UK: Oxford Uni- the importance of sustainable development for the chem- versity Press. ist and chemical engineer. 2. Abraham, M.A., & Nguyen, N. (2003). Results from I am thankful to Gary Bennett, Editor of Environ- the San Destin Conference: Green engineering: De- mental Progress, for providing me the opportunity to fining the principles. Environmental Progress, 22, develop this special issue. I also recognize the many 233–236. people who contributed to this issue, either by provid- 3. Barrera-Roldan, A., & Saldivar-Valdes, A. (2002). ing reviews of these papers or by providing sugges- Proposal and application of a sustainable develop- tions for the selection of papers to be included in this ment index. Ecological Indicators, 2, 251–256. issue. Special thanks to Earl Beaver and the other lead- 4. Palmer, A.R. (1999). Ecological footprints: Evaluat- ers of SEF, who have supported the development of ing sustainability. Environmental Geoscience, 6, this issue from the beginning. I hope you enjoy this 200 –204. selection of articles. 5. American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). Martin Abraham (2003). Bylaws for the Sustainable Engineering Fo- Professor Chemical and Environmental Engineering rum (Rev. 3, January), available electronically at The University of Toledo, OH http://chem1.eng.wayne.edu/⬃qxu/SEF_Web/.
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