Engineers play a crucial role in creating infrastructure in the world. Engineers are problem solvers who apply their knowledge and experience to building projects that meet human needs, and to cleaning up environmental problems. They work on a wide range of issues and projects, and as a result, how engineers work can have a significant impact on progress toward sustainable development.

Engineers can contribute to sustainable development along the entire chain of modern production and consumption, including the following:

• Extracting and developing natural resources

• Processing and modifying resources

• Designing and building transportation infrastructure

• Meeting the needs of consumers

• Recovering and reusing resources

• Producing and distributing energy

The Roles of Engineers

Approximately 15 million engineers populate the world today. As in many other professions, there are different kinds of engineers, including civil, environmental, mechanical, electrical, chemical, industrial, agricultural, mining, petroleum and computer engineers.

Engineers are involved with two kinds of projects:

1. They design and build projects that meet basic human needs (potable water, food, housing, sanitation, energy, transportation, communication, resource development and industrial processing).

2. They solve environmental problems (create waste treatment facilities, recycle resources, clean up and restore polluted sites and protect or restore natural ecosystems).

Engineers are problem solvers. They use skills or information that include the following:

• The results of scientific discoveries

• Empirical experience gained from centuries of construction

• Innovative approaches gained from recent projects

• Analyses of costs versus benefits over the life of projects

• Evaluation of environmental impacts versus benefits

• Consideration of political, cultural and social environments at project locations

Engineers are involved in many functions in their work. These include the following:

• Baseline studies of natural and built environments

• Analyses of project alternatives

• Feasibility studies

• Environmental impact studies

• Assistance in project planning, approval and financing

• Design and development of systems, processes and products

• Design and development of construction plans

• Project management

• Construction supervision and testing

• Process design

• Startup operations and training

• Assistance in operations

• Management consulting

• Environmental monitoring

• Decommissioning of facilities

• Restoration of sites for other uses

• Resource management

• Measuring progress for sustainable development

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Sustainable Engineering

Engineers can play an important role in sustainable development by planning and building projects that preserve natural resources, are cost-efficient and support human and natural environments. A closed-loop human ecosystem can be used to illustrate the many activities of engineers that support sustainable development.

Resource Development and Extraction

Engineers are involved in developing and extracting natural resources in many different ways:
	Planning open-pit and underground mining operations
	Petroleum engineering and designing offshore oil platforms
	Water resource planning of all kinds including dams, irrigation systems and wells
	Agricultural engineering in land reclamation, drainage and improved farm operations
	Designing tree plantations and managing forests
	Designing fish farms and supporting aquaculture
	Improved land planning to protect the best farmland and natural resources from the impact of urban sprawl

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Processing and Modifying Resources

In the past, many industries generated waste products that were toxic and not easily degraded under natural conditions. In the last 100 years, this has led to environmental pollution and new laws and regulations to help protect the environment. Because of improved measuring and monitoring technologies, pollution has been identified that was previously unknown. Many industries are now making major changes in the ways they use raw materials to produce products—by reducing their waste to a minimum, many are finding that improved processing leads to increased profits.

Engineers play the following roles in processing and modifying resources:

• Developing instrumentation to measure and monitor pollution

• Changing industrial processes to reduce the use of energy and other resources and to eliminate waste wherever possible

• Considering the total input/output of operations over their complete life-cycles

• Designing products and packaging for re-use or resource recovery

• Collaborating with other industries by creating "eco parks" or applied industrial ecology. With this approach, several industries work together so that each industry's waste products can be used as the raw materials for others. This also makes possible more efficient use of waste heating and cooling water and using combined waste treatment facilities.

• Restoring and modifying old industrial sites for other uses

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Transportation

In the past 200 years, engineers have made continuous breakthroughs in developing transportation systems:
	Building canals, locks and improving river navigation
	Designing and building all-weather roads and highways
	Constructing pipelines that move liquid and gas products
	Designing engines and transportation vehicles
	Building bridges and tunnels
	Constructing railroads and high-speed rail systems
	Creating ports and harbors
	Designing airplanes, airports and air traffic control systems

In the future, engineers will design these transportation systems so that they will:

• Be more energy efficient

• Create fewer adverse environmental impacts

• Encourage sound urban and rural planning with less urban sprawl

• Create longer-life facilities that can be maintained at lower costs

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Meeting Human Needs

By the year 2020, there may be 8 billion people in the world. Over 80 percent of this population will be in countries that we describe as "less developed" or "developing." About half the world's population lives in cities today; within 15 years, there may be more than 20 cities with populations of 10 million or more, and 500 cities will have more than a million inhabitants. In the next 25 years most of the population is expected to live in "mega-cities" in developing nations. The engineering profession will be under continuing pressure to help provide the food and other resources to this growing population, and the traditional roles of engineers will be stretched to satisfy the future needs of mega-cities.

The roles of engineers in meeting human needs include the following:
	Creative land planning and development to minimize negative environmental impacts
	In emerging mega-cities, helping to establish local organizations that can provide the necessary infrastructure
	Providing treatment facilities and distribution systems for potable water
	Designing systems to collect and store food and other supplies
	Designing housing and commercial buildings
	Developing streets, utility lines, public transportation and other infrastructure
	Using underground space for recreation and other uses
	Providing technologies and facilities for heating and air conditioning
	Creating high-quality treatments for liquid and solid waste
	Reducing the risks of damage and loss of life from natural hazards such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes

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Resource Recovery and Reuse

According to a World Resources Institute report, the USA currently produces more than 20 billion metric tons of materials per year, about 80 tons per person. The direct input into the built environment is over 3 billion metric tons. A high proportion of the materials used consists of industrial minerals such as sand, gravel and crushed stone.

In 1990 the average North American produced over 1500 pounds of municipal solid waste, compared to about 700 pounds by the average Western European. Eighty percent of all products in the USA are thrown away after one use. For sustainable development to be possible, our human activities will have to be redesigned to reuse our raw materials and consumer products many times over.

Engineers can assist in this process in several ways:
	Improving ways to recycle and reuse domestic waste
	Designing better solid waste collection and storage facilities
	Improving methods to collect and reuse construction materials such as concrete and asphalt from roads, and ways to reuse scrap metal and other natural and synthetic materials.
	Improving treatment facilities for urban organic waste and human waste so that the treated fluids and solids may be used safely for agriculture and other purposes.
	Recovering, reusing and remanufacturing byproducts from resource development and industrial processing

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Environmental Restoration

Some environmental pollution is inevitable in the future, resulting from resource extraction, industrial processing and transportation, and from wastes generated by humans wherever we live. In the future, the impacts of residual wastes should be offset by a variety of environmental restoration projects.

 

Engineers can assist in restoring environments in several ways:
	Treating and restoring old industrial waste sites
	Reclaiming old mine properties
	Treating polluted groundwater, lakes and streams
	Restoring the ecology of lakes and wetlands
	Renewing aging urban areas in large cities
	Reclaiming and restoring eroded or damaged farmlands

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Energy Production and Use

We now use 80 times more energy than we did in 1850, with attendant emissions of carbon, sulfur and nitrogen byproducts creating unacceptable levels of pollution. Humans consume more fossil fuels per year than nature produces in a million years. The long-term effects of increased energy use may produce major changes in the earth's climate.

The American Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has estimated that energy use in America could be reduced by 50% without any reduction in the country's standard of living. One of the greatest engineering challenges for the future will be to develop less environmentally damaging sources of energy while simultaneously reducing total energy consumption.

In the future, the roles of engineers in energy production may include the following:
	More efficiently extracting and processing remaining petroleum and gas reserves
	Improving the efficiency of electric power stations and using superconductors for power distribution
	Reconsidering the use of nuclear power, assuming that safer facilities can be developed for generating power and handling nuclear wastes
	Expanding the use of hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, wind, and biomass energy

Engineers can also play a role in conserving and reducing the use of energy in the following ways:

• Designing energy-efficient buildings

• Designing industrial processes that are more energy efficient

• Using low-energy lighting systems

• Designing more efficient automobiles and public transportation systems

• Increasing the use of underground construction

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