originally posted on one of my several now defunct blogs, called On Engineering, under my persona The Canny Engineer, on the 2nd of May 2013
I never wanted to be a doctor, nor could I ever be a surgeon. It’s one of those inexplicable things - you can tell me over and over again that the components that make up the human body each have their (vastly more basic) equivalents in engineering: structures, pumps, tubing, fluid mechanics, control systems - but I can’t get past the whole “blood” thing. I’m squeamish.
(Others, fortunately, aren’t)
Equally, I find it uncomfortable sometimes to think about our environment, and our impact on this world we inhabit. And if you read too much about it all in the press, it’s easy to sink into worry, to feel helpless, powerless.
Squeamishness and worry have no place in medicine, nor in studies into the state of our environment. The only way to work effectively in those fields is through immersion: in the data, in the testing and analysis, in the nuts and bolts of it all. The only way to demonstrate your care and mastery is by results, not by emotion.
The authors of Sustainable Engineering, Dr’s. David T. Allen and David R. Shonnard, have very successfully eliminated emotion from this work.
That is a compliment, of course, and I am sure they would see it that way, too. The book is not a cheery, superficial case of “engineers to the rescue!” Instead, Allen and Shonnard are the sober and cool-headed experts, completely immersed in and at ease with their field, able to bandy about and work with numbers like humankind’s 450 quadrillion BTU energy consumption in 2006, or use of over 120 million tons of iron per year, without apparent effort, or drama. In this way, they call to mind astronomers contemplating the size of Antares - and with this book, they are setting the framework for us to join in that conversation.
The language used in the book is unsurprisingly far from conversational. For that, we would need to turn to equivalents such as David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air. Sometimes it borders on the heroically dry: (“a methodology was used that first defined a system to evaluate, estimated environmental releases, determined exposure to sensitive human and environmental receptors,and calculated damage to human health or impacts to the environment.") Overall, though. the authors manage to remain comfortably in the background - which is an admirable achievement on such a potentially flammable topic - in order to present the data and methodologies of engineering for sustainability.
The structure of the book is logical, but somehow overly so. Having the basics at the beginning and the case studies at the end makes sense, with the build-up in between, but I felt that some re-jigging of the chapters would have helped better to engage their readers, engineers like me, thinking impatiently: “great, very interesting - but where’s the engineering?” Whilst it’s true that this is principally a text book rather than a reader, the structure is perhaps even a little old-fashioned, stoic, even.
By their very nature, the trawl through the “meat” chapters in this sustainable sandwich of a book - Risk and life-cycle frameworks, and Environmental Law and Regulation - is particularly hard-going. The information and methods to be found in there can be extremely thought-provoking, such as a medical risk assessment of cancer through benzene exposure versus being a married or unmarried male, or charts showing the explosion in number of environmental regulations, but it’s a dreary trudge nevertheless. It would have been better to dissipate the effect, I feel, by interspersing these chapters with the engineering ones. Also, perhaps as an aside, and considering that the overwhelming majority of readers is likely to be students, the life-cycle analysis of disposable versus cloth nappies (diapers), whilst undoubtedly a classic example, is perhaps not the most relevant Allen and Shonnard could have chosen. Perhaps the subtext of “life goes on” was intended?
Chapter 4, with the slightly awkward title of “Green, sustainable materials” (does the word “green” belong in this context? It strikes me as more of a journalistic term, rather than an engineering one - but perhaps today’s student would feel otherwise), is really an extended life-cycle analysis dealing with the extraction and disposal of materials. Again, it contains some fascinating thought-starters that reward the careful reader: gasoline, for example, is easy absorbed by soil (which sounds bad). Ethanol and MTBE, both additions in terms of trying to improve air quality - MTBE reduces CO output - on the other hand, are less easily absorbed and so are more likely to seep through the soil to reach water sources, and so can pose a greater direct environmental risk in that scenario.
Only in Chapter 5 (of six), “Design for Sustainability…,” do we encounter the engineering process, along with the best summary of what the authors want the reader to understand: “The goal of sustainable engineering design is to create products that meet the needs of today in an equitable fashion while maintaining healthy ecosystems and without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their resource needs.” The chapter deals with the design and costing of systems and components according to the principles of Sustainable Engineering (there are nine of them, according to Sandestin, or twelve if you’re a disciple of Anastas and Zimmerman). These 12+9 principles are listed and described at length, causing a certain glazing of the eyes and reinforcing the idea that this book is to be treated as a reference rather than a recipe.
The key phrase, perhaps of the whole book, is also to be found in this chapter: “…anything that can be measured can be improved.” In essence, life-cycle or risk analysis is a simple matter of multiplying and adding huge or tiny numbers. Emphatically non-trivial is finding what those numbers are. Here, Allen and Shonnard provide an excellent portal into the arcane world of environmental, medical and chemical factors.
The biggest resistance to engineers really starting to work according to the 12+9 principles will be the finding, testing and approving all of the relevant environmental parameters before they can begin to measure the current state of environmental affairs for their product, or even hope to measure the effectiveness of changes made. Convincing management to invest resource and money in these will be difficult - the hope is that it won’t only happen via the negative pressures of ever-increasing regulation and fines.
In the end, this is an important book that deserves its place in the engineering body of knowledge. As the authors themselves state, the methods of design and engineering for sustainability are not yet mature, not crystallised into procedures and workflows; it is not by a long stretch the “normal course of business.”
From my own experience, environmental considerations are largely ad-hoc and regulations-driven. How we as an engineering community implement design for sustainability as the normal course of business rests largely with our colleagues in academia for now. Once the methods and evidence of gains seep through society into industry, the upcoming generation of engineers should simply not have to think about it. They will have become immersed.
Now, the final question has to be: is it more environmentally sound to buy Sustainable Engineering as an ebook or on paper…?
The book for reviewing was provided by Pearson North America with no strings attached save that I produce this post. That I gladly did, although it took far longer than I had intended. Still, we got there in the end!
