Rethinking the design of products and systems upstream of manufacturing processes, without sacrificing economic viability and performance, is the founding principle of green engineering. “Green Engineering” considers sustainability through the lens of eco-design processes, aiming to enhance our energy efficiency and reduce our environmental impact. An overview of green engineering with the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne.
Green Engineering: What are we talking about?
Before defining green engineering, it is appropriate to provide a brief definition of the concept of sustainability. The main mantra of sustainability is to live within the ecological limits of a finite planet, challenging the mercantile ideal of infinite growth and the temptation of irresponsible and excessive exploitation of the planet’s resources.
Green engineering therefore involves using hardware and software technologies to reduce our environmental impact. Thanks to the measurement data we can now leverage through Big Data, we can better understand our resource consumption and how to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and adopt cleaner alternative solutions. For the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “green engineering is the design, commercialization, and use of processes and products that are feasible and economical while reducing the generation of pollution at the source and minimizing risks to human health and the environment.”
Designing Sustainable Solutions Upstream of Manufacturing Processes
The principles of green engineering are timely in addressing the challenges posed by global population growth, the scarcity of certain resources, global warming, and, more broadly, the globalization of trade. According to a 2019 United Nations report, the world population is expected to increase by 2 billion people over the next 30 years, rising from 7.7 billion people currently to 9.7 billion in 2050.
It is in this context that the 12 principles of green engineering were developed in 2003 by Paul Anastas and Julie Zimmerman, both professors of chemical, environmental, and forest engineering and environmental studies at Yale University. These principles were formulated to outline a protocol for transitioning to a technical design of sustainability.
In other words, green engineering aims to go beyond the principles of basic engineering, positioning itself (somewhat like eco-design) upstream of manufacturing processes, focusing on the design of innovative, eco-responsible, and human-safe materials, processes, and manufacturing systems. The 12 principles conceptualized by Anastas and Zimmerman consider sustainability as a fundamental factor from the earliest stages of product or process design. Thus, for Anastas and Zimmerman, preventing waste is to be prioritized over having to treat it after formation, and the design of unnecessary product capability (ostentatious or not meeting any user need) is considered a design flaw. Fully aware of the challenges of sustainability and energy efficiency, the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne offers a “Energy Valorization Engineer” training program, which meets the energy optimization needs of industrial infrastructures.
