Is sustainability the new challenge to consulting engineers?

By Nicholas Sonntag, President CH2M HILL Canada Limited

Today, the engineering community faces the fundamental challenge of helping society to achieve sustainable development, which involves balancing social, environmental and economic needs during the development process. Our take-make-waste model that draws freely on energy, materials, and ecological resources, under the assumption that they are limitless, must be changed.

Engineers have helped to perpetuate this model by directing their efforts toward finding cheaper ways to extract more resources, rather than on ways to recycle or use less. Inner cities with their existing infrastructures are left to decay, while we claim more open lands and add to our sprawl. We have figured out ways to access more of our limited water resources, rather than finding ways to use less, or recycle what we have.

Conversely, sustainable development is about finding new ways to deliver essential services to the public and to do business. It demands change: doing more with less, new technologies and manufacturing processes, more use of recyclable materials, and the development of regenerative or recyclable output components.

In our experience, sustainable engineering solutions can provide economic, social and environmental benefits for clients and their communities. They can even help companies realize competitive advantages in the marketplace, since an approach that embraces sustainability offers a way to capture new markets and financing opportunities. The sustainable development concept is steadily gaining acceptance and traction in the business world, with more and more companies around the world recognizing that it’s the wave of the future. But progress has been slower than many of us would like, and perhaps slower than it needs to be.

Because of their role in designing, planning, managing and building infrastructure, products and technologies, and in solving environmental problems, consulting engineers can – and must – play a critical role in the development of the future. To be agents of change and leaders in the quest for sustainable development, they need to:

• Develop a strong business case for sustainable development. For the most part, sustainable development is currently portrayed as a noble cause without much practical application. Corporate CEOs, faced with increasing competition, cost pressures and a rapidly changing business environment, need solid proof that becoming sustainable will help their companies survive and be profitable.
• Develop technologies that foster sustainable growth, while maintaining and enhancing quality of life. Sustainable development poses a string of design problems. For example how do you produce products and services that use fewer critical resources, release fewer contaminants, contain less toxins, and can be recycled, but offer the same quality at an equal or lower cost? While complex and difficult, these are invigorating problems that stretch our thinking and create whole new markets and technical disciplines.
• Become leaders as well as doers. We need to work in a collaborative and consultative environment to effectively lead the way into a new kind of industrial age. To do so, we must become part of the broader decision and policy-making processes that affect us.
• Teach others about the problems with our current production-consumption model. To reset our course toward sustainability, we need to develop simple messages that explain the rationale behind sustainable development and the need for action.

We also need to learn more about the impending problems of non-sustainable behaviour and technologies needed to solve them. I believe that engineers are uniquely positioned to take action in these areas. They possess not only the predictive tools to see impending environmental problems, but also the technological tools and creativity to solve them.