Environmental sustainability in undergraduate engineering education

There is hardly any industry sector in which the management of environmental sustainability is not of significant relevance. It is unfortunate that engineering and cognate areas of education has, for the most part ignored these vital issues. It is therefore, essential that all facets of engineering, design and manufacturing education take action on environmental sustainability concerns through appropriate strategies. This paper describes how, (a) an EU educational intervention has been devised to help promote environmental sustainability in engineering (and other); Small to Medium sized Industries (SMEs), as well as making the tutorials available to university undergraduate programs in selected Universities across the EU, and (b) the design and implementation of an undergraduate module entitled Design for Environmental Sustainability, in an Irish University. The EU intervention tutorials have been used to provide background support for the module. The module has been devised and implemented in several engineering and cognate programmes, which include engineering, product design, and technology teacher disciplines, to form a mixed cohort of students. In the context of engineering education this paper discusses the strategies used and the initial impact, of (i) the introductory program intended for SMEs and Universities, and (ii) the introduction and evaluation of the undergraduate environmental sustainability module. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2007.