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21st century environeers
Want to build a sustainable future? You’ll need an engineer in there somewhere. So what’s the profession doing about it? Not a lot - but that could be about to change, says Sara Parkin, thanks to the gauntlet thrown down by a group of young ‘engineers for the 21st century’. At every turning point of history there has been an engineer. Yet as we hit the vital turn from ‘business as usual’ to a more sustainable future, the profession has never been less well prepared. And that’s a tragedy. Because while sustainable development is, at heart, an ethical challenge - we need to choose to do it - it is also a highly practical one.We are a hugely wasteful society. Of every 1,000 kg each of us consumes every year, only 100g is still in use after six months. Think about it. So a switch to sustainability demands that we work out how to do a whole lot more with radically less. And there could not be a challenge more up the street of the engineering profession.
Indeed, engineers have helped shape some of the absolute essentials of sustainability thinking. As long ago as 1824 it was an engineer, Sadie Carnot, who first articulated the thermodynamic principles of energy change. More recently, it was a NASA rocket scientist, Robert Müller, who observed that all pollution was the inevitable consequence of putting more energy through our economy than the natural world could process.
Every graduate engineer should know this stuff backwards. So it’s galling to see such basic principles being so widely neglected. A senior engineer in a major UK company candidly confessed to me that he had spent several million pounds on ‘end-of- pipe’ clean-up technology, before he remembered that if he really wanted to reduce emissions coming out of his pipes he needed to reduce what goes in.
Education, as ever, is part of the problem - and of the solution. There is a desperate shortage of creative, well-trained and motivated young engineers to tackle the highly practical challenge of bringing the operation of our economy into line with the capacity of the environment to cope with it. And this is worrying everyone -from Stephen Byers in the DTI, with his global competitiveness hat on, to Friends of the Earth activists weighing up the relative merits of a landfill site or a waste incinerator in Yorkshire.
One of the problems is the structure of the engineering profession in the UK. There is nowhere for engineers who are aware of sustainability and the opportunities it presents to congregate and to lever some influence. The Engineering Council, set up nearly 30 years ago to act as an overarching body for the profession, would be the logical place, but it has few real powers - despite running a first-class, inspiring environmental award scheme. And with 37 member institutions, each of them focused on their own speciality, it has a devil of a job to co-ordinate some shared thinking on the issue. The job of leading on the environment sits with the Institute of Chemical Engineers, which inevitably means that a certain focus is going to predominate.
The DTI has asked Dr Robert Hawley, chair of the Engineering Council, to carry out a review of its activities, but his latest report doesn’t even mention sustainable development. This is, to say the least, disappointing, since the Council clearly has a wonderful opportunity to lead the profession in a strategic renewal based on sustainability principles.
There are points of light elsewhere. Cambridge University is to appoint a Chair in Sustainable Development Engineering, for example, and the construction industry has embarked on an ambitious strategy to improve its environmental performance. But it is all too little, too scattered and far too slow.
What’s infuriating about this, is that there are examples of truly innovative thinking among engineers. Just have a look at some of the winners in the Engineering Council’s Awards scheme, which include, for example, imaginative ways of curbing greenhouse gases while enhancing the comfort factor in homes and offices; of welding aluminium - an absolutely key part of the modern industrial economy - in a way that cuts energy consumption by a staggering 97.5%.
The technologies really are either there or very nearly there. Missing are enough businesses sufficiently knowledgeable and visionary to grasp the opportunities.
This kind of impasse prompted the Engineer of the 21st Century Inquiry. Some exciting, talented and committed young engineers produced an inspiring report that sets out unequivocally what they expect the profession to do to make good the lost time. Their recommendations did not duck the ethical issues either, including the personal responsibility of individual engineers.
Companies - and professions - that fail to shake off their dinosaur past will become extinct. It was always thus in the ecology of the economy. But now the ecology of the environment is signalling that while nature may work on evolutionary time-scales, we cannot afford to. And of all professions, no one needs to read those signals more clearly - and respond to them with greater vigour -than engineers.
The petrochemical companies, some of whom are giving a lead in how sustainable development can transform rather than destroy a business, may not have come out of September’s petrol crisis covered in glory. But the fact that a ‘just in time’ UK economy could be brought to a standstill in just a minute, should give a great boost to more energy efficient vehicles and transport systems (for freight and for the public); to more secure and diverse as well as environmentally friendly sources of energy; and to an economy that in general delivers more quality of life with less energy.
Sara Parkin is programme director of Forum for the Future.
Engineers for the 21st Century
“Environeering.” That’s how The Guardian described the future mapped out by the 32 young engineers who carried out this inquiry. Supported by two government departments and 16 companies, along with Forum for the Future, the young engineers set out to develop a vision of the 21st-century engineer; of their role in helping to achieve sustainable development; and of the policies and mechanisms needed to support them.
They worked in five theme-based consortia: Ethics and Values; Learning and Participation; Practice and Partnerships; Innovation and Technology; and Incentives and Costs. A ‘Top Ten’ set of recommendations that would do most to set the ball rolling were given headline treatment in the final report presented to Lord Sainsbury, minister of science at the DTI, before a full house of engineers from all corners of the profession at the Royal Society back in June.
There will be a follow-up seminar next year, when young engineers will assess just how much progress has been made by companies, government, engineering faculties and professional bodies - all of whom have been challenged to respond.
Top Ten Recommendations
1. All public procurement (central and local government) should adopt sustainability standards, reporting on outcomes in the Green Ministers report.
2. By 2005, all graduate engineering courses should integrate sustainable development.
3. Participation and consultation, with sustainable development as a standard item, should be used at all stages of a project.
4. An accelerated programme should extend material specification to cover sustainable development issues, and all relevant standards should be overhauled by 2005.
5. As a matter of policy, engineers and their employers should routinely request full sustainability specifications from suppliers.
6. Government should increase incentives for sustainability, and remove inconsistencies from existing legislation.
7. The Engineering Council should produce an annual ‘State of the Profession’s Contribution to Sustainable Development’ report, including a follow-up on these recommendations.
8. Value Engineering techniques should be used to look beyond the technical challenge to ethical and value issues.
9. The value of learning through inter-disciplinary secondments, voluntary and other relevant experience should be recognised by employers.
10. Employers should incorporate sustainability skills and objectives into personnel appraisals, recruitment and career development systems by 2005.
Copies of the report may be obtained fromk.glynn@forumforthefuture.org.uk
Inquiry sponsors
Consortia patrons
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