Sustainable Engineering: An
Initiative for Chemical Engineers
Martin Abraham
Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH 43606
Published online 19 November 2004 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ep.10043
Over the past several years, there has been consid-
erable discussion about green chemistry, green engi-
neering, and sustainability. These terms are often used
interchangeably, and although there is a fair amount of
overlap in these concepts, each has a quite distinct
definition (see Figure 1). Each seeks to address the
issue of environmental stewardship from a slightly dif-
ferent perspective and, as such, each identifies a dif-
ferent set of issues and potential solutions. It would be
inappropriate to identify one of these concepts as all-
encompassing and the others as subsets of the first;
rather, these terms represent different perspectives on
the issues, challenges, and solutions of environmental
stewardship.
According to Anastas and Warner [1], green chemis-
try is “the design of chemical products and processes
that are more environmentally benign and reduce neg-
ative impacts to human health and the environment.”
As expected, green chemistry places the issue of envi-
ronmental stewardship into the context of chemistry.
The challenges are generally presented as those asso-
ciated with the production of molecules, such as the
manufacture of safer chemicals, the use of more benign
solvents, more selective chemistry, and the use of cat-
alysts. However, there is also discussion of issues that
go well beyond the bounds of traditional chemistry,
such as concerns for energy use, minimization of risk,
and real-time in-process monitoring.
Simultaneously, the Environmental Protection
Agency defines green engineering as the design, com-
mercialization, and use of processes and products,
which are feasible and economical while minimizing
(1) generation of pollution at the source and (2) risk to
human health and the environment. During a confer-
ence in San Destin, Florida in May 2003, run under the
auspices of Engineering Conferences International, ap-
proximately 65 engineers and scientists refined the def-
© 2004 American Institute of Chemical Engineers
Environmental Progress (Vol.23, No.4)
inition [2] as “Green Engineering transforms existing
engineering disciplines and practices to those that pro-
mote sustainability” and provided a list of principles.
Several of the concepts overlap with the principles of
green chemistry, such as the goal of preventing waste
and the use of inherently safe material and energy
inputs and outputs. However, the emphasis from this
group was generally at the systems level. Thus, con-
cepts that were developed include the use of life-cycle
methods, conservation and improvement of natural
ecosystems, and minimizing the depletion of natural
resources. This last concept is stated in an unusual way;
typically, it is simply suggested to use renewable re-
sources, whereas the green engineering principle that
addresses this issue requires minimal depletion of nat-
ural resources. By incorporating the concept of time
into the statement, the San Destin group makes clear
that even renewable resources can become exhausted
if society becomes overly dependent on them.
Sustainability, or sustainable development, has be-
come a major driving initiative in engineering busi-
nesses throughout the world. Sustainable development
is generally defined according to the original definition
of the Brundtland Commission (1989): providing for
human needs without compromising the ability of fu-
ture generations to meet their needs. As such, sustain-
ability has three underlying bases [3]:
● Economic viability: the costs and business aspects of
a project
● Social concerns: human health and social welfare
● Natural or ecological issues: depletion of natural
capital and the environment
Thus, we see that sustainability couples issues of envi-
ronmental stewardship with concerns for human
health, and places them in a context in which economic
performance remains a priority. Sustainability recog-
nizes that an environmentally appropriate product or
process must also be economically self-supporting;
particularly in North America, the consumer is reluctant
to invest greater capital in a product simply because it
is less environmentally harmful. Whereas green chem-
December 2004 261

Figure 1. Relationship between green chemistry,
green engineering, and sustainability. [Color figure
can be viewed in the online issue, which is available
at www.interscience.wiley.com.]
istry addresses issues of natural capital, and green en-
gineering addresses both natural capital and economic
viability, sustainability also addresses the human con-
dition and implores the individual to improve the qual-
ity of life for all habitants.
Although engineers and scientists have been con-
cerned about environmental matters since the early
1970s, and green chemistry and engineering became
prevalent in the 1990s, only today are we getting to the
point in which we can be quantitative in our analysis.
Researchers are defining sustainability metrics that at-
tempt to capture various performance metrics into a
single parameter. For example, the ecological footprint
measures the amount of land area required to support
the lifestyle of the average citizen, accounting for con-
sumption of both natural resources and energy [4].
Today, green engineering has become a major pro-
grammatic emphasis in the American Institute of Chem-
ical Engineers (AIChE), just as green chemistry has
been a major programmatic emphasis in the American
Chemical Society (ACS) for the last 5 (or so) years.
Within AIChE, green engineering efforts are coordi-
nated through the Sustainable Engineering Forum
(SEF), created in 2002, “to serve as an international
forum and to promote information exchange, scholar-
ship, research and education in the application of the
principles of sustainability and sustainable develop-
ment to engineering in general, and chemical engineer-
ing in particular” [5]. Within ACS, substantial efforts
exist within the Industrial and Engineering Chemistry
Division, working with the Green Chemistry Institute to
address many of the wide-ranging issues of green
chemistry.
Symposia organized by both ACS and AIChE often
focus on technical questions that surround green chem-
istry and engineering, but often do not approach a
similar level of attention for the issues of sustainability.
Together, these two programming groups represent a
large percentage of the scientific discussion on the
issues and challenges facing the chemistry and chemi-
cal engineering community as it tries to meet the sus-
tainability challenge. In recent years, there has been
considerable interest in integrating these programming
262 December 2004
efforts to provide a more complete picture of the chem-
ical challenges of sustainability. It is clear that the issues
of energy efficiency, minimization of hazardous wastes,
decreased use of solvents (either through solvent re-
placement or through increased solvent recycling), and
many others that address technical issues of sustain-
ability rest in the area of green chemistry and green
engineering. The convergence of these programming
efforts represents a significant development for the
sustainability community.
The papers included within this special issue of
Environmental Progress have been taken from many of
the sessions organized by the SEF for the AIChE 2003
Annual Meeting, and represent a cross section of those
that were presented at the meeting. In developing this
issue, special effort was made to go beyond green
engineering and place the technical challenges into a
sustainability context. This point is brought to light in
the contribution from Michael Heusseman of PNNL
(Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), who makes it
clear that the challenges of sustainability are more
widespread than those that an engineer can address.
Although he agrees that technical improvements will
lead to decreasing environmental impact, he also
points out that increasing GDP and population can
counteract the effects of these improvements. The con-
tribution is presented as the author’s opinion, and
should not be construed as the general opinion of the
technical community, which generally agrees that ad-
vances in ecoefficiency are essential as society attempts
to move toward sustainability.
A more optimistic assessment of the state of develop-
ment is presented in the contribution from Beth Beloff
and her collaborators at Bridges to Sustainability, who
point out that industry is making substantial progress in
the development of sustainable processes. A complemen-
tary analysis is offered by Mary Ann Curran, who illus-
trates some of the life-cycle assessment tools now avail-
able to industry and demonstrates how they can be
applied. Additional contributions provide new develop-
ments in life-cycle assessment, describing recent ad-
vances and the application of these new techniques to
industrial processes. Charlene Wall, of BASF, goes one
step further in her contribution, providing a more com-
plete example based on ecoefficiency analysis.
One of the principles espoused uniformly in green
chemistry, green engineering, and sustainability is that
of the use of renewable resources as a basis for the
production of energy and for industrial processes. As
illustrated by the scope of these papers, several oppor-
tunities exist for the use of renewable resources, in-
cluding as a raw material for the production of chem-
icals, use as a transportation fuel, or use as an
alternative construction material. Each opportunity can
be optimized for a specific resource, based on its own
set of productions parameters. This special issue high-
lights the importance of renewable resources through
the final three papers in the issue, all of which provide
a systems analysis for the use of renewable resources.
The papers selected for this issue represent a small
subset of those papers presented at the 2003 AIChE An-
nual Meeting, and all of those papers represent a subset of
the total number of contributions made within any given
Environmental Progress (Vol.23, No.4)
year. The large number of publications focused on green
chemistry and green engineering and the proliferation of
new journals that focus on these research areas exemplify
the importance of sustainable development for the chem-
ist and chemical engineer.
I am thankful to Gary Bennett, Editor of Environ-
mental Progress, for providing me the opportunity to
develop this special issue. I also recognize the many
people who contributed to this issue, either by provid-
ing reviews of these papers or by providing sugges-
tions for the selection of papers to be included in this
issue. Special thanks to Earl Beaver and the other lead-
ers of SEF, who have supported the development of
this issue from the beginning. I hope you enjoy this
selection of articles.
Martin Abraham
Professor Chemical and Environmental Engineering
The University of Toledo, OH
Environmental Progress (Vol.23, No.4)
LITERATURE CITED
1. Anastas, P.T., & Warner, J.C. (1998). Green chemis-
try : Theory and practice, Oxford, UK: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
2. Abraham, M.A., & Nguyen, N. (2003). Results from
the San Destin Conference: Green engineering: De-
fining the principles. Environmental Progress, 22,
233–236.
3. Barrera-Roldan, A., & Saldivar-Valdes, A. (2002).
Proposal and application of a sustainable develop-
ment index. Ecological Indicators, 2, 251–256.
4. Palmer, A.R. (1999). Ecological footprints: Evaluat-
ing sustainability. Environmental Geoscience, 6,
200 –204.
5. American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE).
(2003). Bylaws for the Sustainable Engineering Fo-
rum (Rev. 3, January), available electronically at
http://chem1.eng.wayne.edu/⬃qxu/SEF_Web/.
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