Chapter 9 - Sustainable Bioethics

Abstract

Ethical engineering is socially responsible engineering. Green engineering is also a bioethical tenet wherein environmentally conscious attitudes, values, and principles, combined with science, technology, and engineering practice, all directed toward improving local and global environmental quality. Green has become recognized as a code for sustainable programs. The term green engineer is no longer a neophyte to the profession, it is now more likely to mean an environmentally oriented engineer. One of the principles of green engineering is the recognition of the importance of sustainability. The underlying purpose of sustainable development is to help developing nations manage their resources, such as rain forests, without depleting these resources and making them unusable for future generations. In short, the objective is to prevent the collapse of the global ecosystems. Therefore, sustainability is a systematic phenomenon, so it is not surprising that engineers have embraced the concept of sustainable design. At the largest scale, manufacturing, transportation, commerce, and other human activities that promote high consumption and wastefulness of finite resources cannot be sustained. At the individual designer scale, the products and the processes that engineers design must be considered for their entire lifetime and beyond.