Sustainable Development for Engineers

A Handbook and Resource Guide

Karel Mulder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351282901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

It is crucial that engineers – from students to those already practising – have a deep understanding of the environmental threats facing the world, if they are to become part of the solution and not the problem. Is there a way to reconcile modern lifestyles with the compelling need for change? Could new improved technologies play a key role? If great leaps in the environmental efficiency of technologies are needed, can they be produced? Engineers are in a privileged and hugely influential position to innovate, design and build a sustainable future. But are they engaged or uninterested? Are they knowledgeable or ignorant? This book has been developed by a number of committed educators in European engineering departments under the leadership of Delft University of Technology and the Technical University of Catalunya to meet the perceived gap between what engineers know and what they should know in relation to sustainable development. The University of Delft decided as long ago as 1998 that all of its engineering graduates, working towards careers as designers, managers or researchers, should be prepared for the challenge of sustainable development and, as such, should leave university able to make sustainable development operational in their designs and daily practices. The huge amount of knowledge gathered on best-practice teaching for engineers is reflected in this book. The aim is to give engineering students a grounding in the challenge that sustainable development poses to the engineering profession, the contribution the engineer can make to attaining some of the societal and environmental goals of sustainability, and the barriers and pitfalls engineers will likely need to confront in their professional lives. Concise but comprehensive, the book examines the key tools, skills and techniques that can be used in engineering design and management to ensure that whole-life costs and impacts of engineering schemes are addressed at every stage of planning, implementation and disposal. The book also aims to demonstrate through real-life examples the tangible benefits that have already been achieved in many engineering projects, and to highlight how real improvements can be, and are being, made. Each chapter ends with a series of questions and exercises for the student to undertake. Sustainable Development for Engineers will be essential reading for all engineers and scientists concerned with sustainable development. In particular, it provides key reading and learning materials for undergraduate and postgraduate students reading environmental, chemical, civil or mechanical engineering, manufacturing and design, environmental science, green chemistry and environmental management.

1 Why do we need sustainability?

This chapter explains what sustainable development is and the consequences of unsustainable practices. It does this by sketching the history of Easter Island—an example of the decline of a community caused by its unsustainable practices. The chapter describes briefly some of the history of the concept of sustainable development and offers a framework for setting targets for future improvements.

Easter Island

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in the Pacific Ocean is one of the most remote inhabited places in the world. It is 3,747 km from Chile (to which it belongs) and 2,250 km from the nearest inhabited island, Pitcairn, Its enormous statues (see Figure 1.1) make it a popular tourist attraction.

The Netherlands admiral Jacob Roggeveen landed on the Easter Island in 1722. On his journey around the world, he was in search of a large mysterious island that was said to be in the Pacific.

When Roggeveen and his crew explored the island they found a population of about 3,000 people living in shacks and dressed in rags. Roggeveen saw the large statues (called Moai) and was intrigued by them. The statues were placed in groups on platforms (Ahu) near the shoreline and all faced inland. Some had separate stone hats. The largest standing statue weighs 82,000 kg (82 tonnes) and is 9.8 m. The statues were cut in a quarry in the middle of the island up to 14 km from the shoreline. A number of semi-finished statues can still be observed at this site together with several finished statues that did not make it to the shoreline.

FIGURE 1.1 Moai at Easter Island
Source: reproduced with permission from Jan Boersema

Roggeveen stayed for only a couple of days on the island. Later explorers described the island life in more detail and puzzled over the statues. Creating the platforms, cutting the statues and transporting them over several kilometres must have taken considerable effort. There are means of transporting an average statue using about 20 people; transport would then take 30-70 days. However, these methods are risky on the rough terrain of Easter Island. More secure methods of transport would use rollers or sledges. These methods are faster but require more people.¹

Two things are clear:

• Creating the statues required a great deal of labour. As most statues date from between 1400 and 1600, Easter Island society would have had to be far more prosperous and far better organised at that time to be able to support these efforts
• Transportation methods that did not use wood would have been very risky for the statues and probably inadequate on the rougher terrain

Another piece of evidence points to the use of wood: the island was covered by bushes and not by trees. Only two Chilean wine palm trees have ever been discovered on the island; they were growing in a canyon and could not be reached. However, archaeologists have proved that the island was once covered by various species of palm trees.

Modern theories regarding Easter Island state that its inhabitants came from Polynesia and arrived there between 400 and 800 AD.² The richness of the land and sea gave the islanders the means to develop a rich culture. The population grew to a level of approximately 7,000 in the 16th century. As the Polynesian social system is based on the clan as dominant unit, clan life was probably the dominant social system on Easter Island too. The Ahu were probably religious symbols that also expressed the status of its owning clan. But what happened?

The growing population and the enormous activity deployed in creating Moai took their toll. The fertile soil eroded and more land was needed for agriculture, Large numbers of trees were cut for building Moai, boats and houses. The island probably ran out of wood and food, but the islanders must have continued chopping trees until the last available one. Consequently they were unable to continue the creation and placement of Moai; they could not build boats anymore and construction of new houses became impossible. The accepted hypothesis is that this coincided with armed conflict between the clans.

The civilisation of Easter Island collapsed because of its unsustainable nature. But why didn't anyone do anything about it? Maybe the inhabitants were not as aware, as we are now, about the harm they were inflicting on the ecosystem of their island. It is unrealistic to assume that a civilisation as highly developed as that on Easter Island did not appreciate the fact that their last tree had been cut down. But in the competitive struggle among clans, not cutting down a tree would mean leaving it for the axes of a competing clan. This is an example of a prisoner's dilemma (see Chapter 4).

Unsustainable societies collapse

The example of Easter Island shows that people cannot act as if their resources are limitless. But Easter Island is not an extreme example. Various civilisations throughout the world have collapsed as a result of their use of unsustainable forms of agriculture. To cite only a few examples:

• When irrigation is used, agriculture yields good harvests in the beginning. But when the water evaporates on the land, it leaves salt in the top layer. Plants are poisoned by too much salt; soon yields start to decline and the land can no longer be used for agriculture. There is evidence that this phenomenon contributed to the collapse of the civilisations of the Maya in Central America, the Indus Valley in southern Asia and Mesopotamian cities in the Middle East
• When agricultural land is drained, hydrostatic pressure can force saline water to rise from lower layers. This can also lead to salt poisoning
• Irrigation often contributes to erosion, removing the productive top layer of soil from the agricultural land. Erosion can also lead to dust storms, which can themselves pose a threat to farms and villages. In the 1930s, the so-called Dust Bowl, caused by years of low rainfall and extensive agricultural production, created a severe problem in the Midwest of the USA. Throughout the world, communities have been destroyed by land erosion
• When the population grows, the increasing need for food can lead to extensive monocultural (single-crop) land use. This can l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Why do we need sustainability?
• 2 Why is the current world system unsustainable?
• 3 Patterns of development
• 4 Sustainable development and economic, social and political structures
• 5 Technology: the culprit or the saviour?
• 6 Measuring sustainability
• 7 Sustainable development and the company: why, what and how?
• 8 Design and sustainable development
• 9 Innovation processes
• 10 Technology for sustainable development
• Index