From Small Scale, Short Term to Large Scale, Long Term: Integrating ‘Sustainability’ into Engineering Education

Abstract

SUMMARY During the last two decades, societal demands on engineering education to provide safe and environmentally benign technology have increased strongly. Delft University of Technology—and the Faculty of Chemical Engineering in particular—has been actively responding to these demands, when necessary by developing radically new educational programmes. The first educational programmes, started in the 1970s, integrated safety, health, the environment and often highly controversial ethical questions; these programmes are continuing. Typical of these programmes is a broadness of approach. Students receive training in the physical-chemical-biological fundamentals of risks posed by engineering, as well as social-philosophical aspects as they study controversial and value-laden contemporary issues, such as biotechnology, energy provision, and possible climate change. The Delft programmes, in many respects still unique and daring even today, have been in use for more than 20 years already and have been applied successfully to thousands of students. The recent advent of the concept of ‘sustainability’, however, requires new approaches. Sustainability greatly increases the spatial, temporal, biological and intellectual scale on which engineering criteria must be based: the entire planet, future generations, whole ecosystems, and philosophical and institutional aspects of our industrial civilization. These philosophical and institutional aspects include the social-economic-political systems of our society, and the values, norms and ethics on which these institutions are based. Incorporating such abstract, extremely complex normative and obviously controversial material into engineering education, and combining this with traditional technical knowledge, is no simple matter. However, this is precisely what the Delft programmes are striving to achieve. How the present programmes evolved and are working, and future developments comprise the subject of this paper.