Chapter 1:

Introduction to Environmental
Engineering

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 What is Environmental
• IsEngineering?
the application of Engineering and Science
principles to:
– Protect and utilize natural resources,
– Control environmental pollution, and
– Improve environmental quality to enable healthy
ecosystems and comfortable habitation of
humans.
•  Is based on multiple disciplines including
engineering, geology, hydrology, biology,
chemistry, physics, medicine, management,
economics, law, etc.
• Is a broad discipline with many parts of its
contents changing fast with time.
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 What do Environmental Engineers Do?
• Who are Environmental Engineers?
are the technical professionals who:
• Identify and design solutions for environmental problems,
• Provide safe drinking water,
• Treat and properly dispose of wastes,
• Maintain air quality,
• Control water pollution,
• Remediate contaminated sites due to spills or improper
disposal of hazardous substances,
• Monitor the quality of the air, water, and land, and
• Develop means to protect the environment.

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 Environmental Engineers

Environmental engineers need to be aware of

the lessons of the past—how problems came
about and how scientists, engineers, policy
makers, and others worked together to solve
them.
We then need to apply those lessons as
appropriate to solve current problems and
prevent similar mistakes in the future.

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• Environmental Engineers work in many venues,
including:
– Engineering consulting firms that design and construct air and
water pollution-control systems;
– Industries that need to treat air or wastewater discharges;
– Private and municipal groups that supply drinking water;
– Companies that treat and dispose of hazardous chemicals;
– Governmental agencies;
– Laboratories that develop pollution-control systems;
– Agencies that transfer knowledge to the developing world; and
– Public interest groups that advocate environmental protection.
 
• Third world countries are in dire need of environmental engineers.
Over 1.1 billion people worldwide live without safe drinking water and
3.4 million people die annually from water-related diseases, 2.6
billion people do not have adequate sanitation, and 3.4 million
people die annually from water-related diseases.

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 What do Civil Engineers Do?
• Civil Engineers employ scientific principles to
serve society. Many Civil Engineers work
internationally to improve the quality of life
throughout the world.
• Civil Engineers design, construct, and maintain
society's infrastructure - the highways, buildings,
and water systems we use daily. Others areas in
which civil engineers work include:

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 What do Civil Engineers Do?

• Construction management;
• Groundwater contamination;
• Transportation design and planning;
• Design, construction, and monitoring of waste containment facilities;
• Disaster prevention;
• River mechanics and stream restoration;
• Earthquake engineering;
• Flood prediction, forecasting, and control;
• Community development;
• Surveying and mapping; and
• Wind engineering

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 What is Engineering & Science?
• Is a profession that applies mathematics and science to utilize
the properties of matter and sources of energy to create useful
structures, machines, products, systems and processes.
• Scientists discover things. Engineers make them work.
• Science is pursuit of knowledge about how the world works.
• Environment derived from the French environner (means to
surround an organism or group of organisms) and is:
The conditions surrounding an organism or group of them; and
the complex social and cultural conditions that affect an
individual or community.

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 Environment
• Environment is defined as “the sum total of water, air and
land and the inter-relationships that exist among them and
with the human beings, other living organisms and
materials.” The concept of environment can be clearly
understood from the following Figure

• Concept of Environment: air,

water, land, living organisms,
and materials surrounding
us and their interactions
together constitute the
environment.

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 Cont’d…
• The discipline is largely defined by problems rather than by
technical/scientific methods.
• Typical problems:
• Remediation of a contaminated site (fixing the fast),
• Treatment of a dirty effluent (dealing with the present),
• Pollution avoidance (planning for the future),
• Breadth, interdisciplinary:
• Systems thinking, various engineering disciplines, even non-
engineering disciplines,
• Challenges: Avoidance of moving one waste from one phase
to another (e.g., air to water or water to solid waste),

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Cont’d…
• Prevention is harder than treatment
• Environmental benefit versus economic burden
(trade-off)
• Role of the public sector: in other areas of
engineering, a need creates a market, and the
market drives technology development. In
environmental engineering, it starts with a
problem, which drives regulations, regulations
create the market, and the market drives the
technology.

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Objectives of Environmental Engineering
Course

• The course covers the fundamental concepts /theories and their

applications in environmental engineering, specifically:
• To provide an overview of core areas in environmental
engineering; 
• To introduce important concepts in environmental
engineering; and
• To introduce the quantitative approach for environmental
assessment and problem solving.

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Core Areas in Environmental
Engineering

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 Who does it affect?

• Everyone & Everything!

–plants
–insects
–animals
–humans
–ecosystems
–our planet

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 What are environmental issues?

• Three areas:
–Air quality
–Land quality
–Water quality

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 History of Civil & Environmental
Engineering
• The first formal university engineering curriculum in the United
States was established at the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point in 1802.

• The first engineering course outside the Academy was offered

in 1821 at the American Literary, Scientific, and Military
Academy, which later became Norwich University.

• The Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute conferred the first truly

civil engineering degree in 1835. In 1852, the American Society
of Civil Engineers was founded (Wisely 1974).

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Cont’d..

• The first comprehensive federal water pollution control

legislation was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1957,
and secondary sewage treatment was not required at
all before passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act. Concern
about clean water has come from the public health
professions and from the study of the science of
ecology.

• Ecology deals with the study of organisms in their

natural home interacting with their surroundings.

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Cont’d..
• A notable failure was the New Orleans system for filtering water
from the Mississippi River. The water proved to be so muddy that
the filters clogged too fast for the system to be workable.
This problem was not alleviated until aluminum sulfate (alum) began
to be used as a pretreatment to filtration.
The use of alum to clarify water was proposed in 1757, but was not
convincingly demonstrated until 1885.
Disinfection of water with chlorine began in Belgium in 1902 and in
America, in Jersey City, NJ, in 1908.
Between 1900 and 1920 deaths from infectious disease dropped
dramatically, owing in part to the effect of cleaner water supplies.

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Cont’d..
• The first system for urban drainage in America was constructed in
Boston around 1700.
There was surprising resistance to the construction of sewers for
waste disposal.
Most American cities had cesspools or vaults, even at the end of
the nineteenth century.
The most economical means of waste disposal was to pump these
out at regular intervals and cart the waste to a disposal site outside
the town.

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Cont’d..
• Civil engineers were responsible for developing engineering
solutions to these water and wastewater problems of these
facilities.
There was, however, little appreciation of the broader aspects of
environmental pollution control and management until the mid-
1900s.
As recently as 1950 raw sewage was dumped into surface waters in
the United States, and even streams in public parks and in U.S. cities
were fouled with untreated wastewater.

•  The science of ecology defines “ecosystems” as interdependent

populations of organisms interacting with their physical and
chemical environment.

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Cont’d..
• An environmental ethic concerns itself with the attitude of
people toward other living things and toward the natural
environment, as well as with their attitudes toward each other.
• In recent years, and particularly after the accident at”
• Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979,
• The release of methyl isocyanate at the chemical plant in
Bhopal, India, in 1984, and
• The disastrous nuclear criticality and fire at the Chernobyl
nuclear power plant in 1986.
• General appreciation of the threats to people and ecosystems
posed by toxic or polluting substances has increased markedly.

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 List of Environmental Engineering
Activities
• Water supply,
• Wastewater management,
• Solid waste management,
• Air pollution control,
• Noise pollution control,
• Radiation protection,
• Environmental sustainability,
• Public health issues,
• Environmental impact assessment,
• Hazardous-waste management,
• Treatment of contaminated land,

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Cont’d..

• Hazard prevention and mitigation,

• Climate change adaptation and mitigation,
• Renewable energy, etc.

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 Ecology & Ecosystems
Ecology is the scientific study of the relationships between
organisms and their environment.
• Ecosystem is a community of living (biotic) organisms (plants,
animals and microbes) in conjunction with the nonliving
components (abiotic) of their environment (air, water and
mineral soil), interacting as a system.
• Ecosystems are dynamic with networks of interactions
among organisms, between organisms and their
environment which are linked together through nutrient
cycle and energy flow.
• Ecosystems are controlled both by external factors
(climate, the parent material which forms the soil and
topography) and internal factors (decomposition, root
competition or shading, disturbance, succession and types
of species).

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Ecosystem Services

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Shift in Pattern

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 What is Sustainability?
• Is the capacity to endure. For human society,
“sustainable development is a development
that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs”.
• Sustainable Engineering = planning for the
future at the global scale.
• Sustainability requires the reconciliation of
environmental, social equity, and economic
demands - the “three pillars” of sustainability
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 Sustainable Development
• Sustainable development is development that meets the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs.
• It contains within it two key concepts:
(1) the concept of “needs,” in particular the essential needs
of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be
given;
(2) the idea of limitations imposed by the state of
technology and social organization on the environment’s
ability to meet present and future needs.

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 Sustainable Design
Sustainable design
Is the design of products, processes, or
systems that balance our beliefs in the sanctity
of human life and promote an enabling
environment for people to enjoy long, healthy,
and creative lives, while protecting and
preserving natural resources for both their real
value and the natural world’s value to human-
kind.

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Human Welfare and Ecological Footprints
Compared

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 Water Footprint
• Is often used to refer to the amount of water used by an individual,
community, business, or nation.
• Is the total volume of freshwater used to produce the goods and
services consumed by individuals or communities or produced by the
business.
• Water footprint components:
• Blue water footprint (evaporated from surface and
groundwater),
• Green water footprint (evaporated from green water resources as
rainwater stored in soils), and
• Grey water footprint (polluted water associated with production of
all foods and services.

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 Issues Related to Sustainability
• Population growth

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Urbanization

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Water

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Energy
 

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 Green Engineering
• Sustainable engineering is the design of man-made systems to
ensure the current uses of natural resources do not lead to
diminished quality of life of future generations.
• ‘design’ is the key word’ here where green engineering is to
design, discover and implement engineering solutions with
an awareness of potential benefits and problems in terms
of environment, economy and society (three pillars of
sustainability) throughout the design lifetime; and
• The goal is to minimize adverse impacts (e.g., water use
inefficiency, depletion of finite materials and energy
resources, urban congestion, water and air pollution,
degradation of environment) while simultaneously
maximizing benefits to the economy, society and
environment.

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Cont’d..
• At many universities, environmental engineering programs
follow either civil engineering or chemical engineering in
engineering faculties with a diverse subject such as:

• Hydrology,
• Water resources Management,
• Bioremediation,
• Water Treatment Plant Design,
• Environmental Chemistry,
• Advanced Air and Water Treatment Technologies, and
Separation Processes.

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 Key Subjects
• Environment (natural and built environments), ecosystems
(energy flow, etc.),

• Sustainability and environmental risk (hazards, risk perception,

risk assessment, risk management, and environmental impact
assessment),

• Water supply (demand, availability, treatment, distribution and

wastewater),

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 What Is Pollution?
• We refer to pollution when we see a highly degraded river bed,
a garbage dump, or any other place where waste accumulation
is obvious.

• Pollution is not an absolute term (e.g., a medium is polluted

medium depending on the use we will make of the medium).
• Water pollution (pollutants, pollution indicators, wastewater
treatment, modelling and standards),
• Solid waste (sources and waste system),
• Air pollution (composition, structure, pollutants, emission
control, modelling and forecasting),
• Noise pollution (sources, properties, measurement, health
effects, and noise control),

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Cont’d..
• Climate change (observation, mechanisms, modeling, impact,
mitigation, and adaptation).
• Other types of pollution are seldom taken into account, but
modify the environment even more deeply than the pollution
types mentioned previously:
Acoustic pollution: spread in large urban developments, that is
only addressed when it bothers directly the area population,
Light pollution: disturbing to a large extent the life of many
species (turtles, birds, etc.),
Visual pollution: modifying the landscape (for instance
mining activities).
Large human agglomerations: disturbing out
intimacy(friendship).

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 Why is air quality such a problem?

Poor air quality can lead to:

• smog
• respiratory & other illnesses
• acid rain
• global warming

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 Air Quality

• Air pollutant: A known

substance in the air that
can cause harm to
humans and the
environment.
–nitrogen oxides (NOx) Effects of acid rain on plants
–sulfur oxides (SOx)
–carbon monoxide (CO)
–carbon dioxide (CO2)
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 Greenhouse Gases & Global Warming

• Global warming: An increase in the

average air temperature of the
Earth.
• Greenhouse effect: Heat from the
sun gets trapped inside the glass of
a greenhouse and heats up its air.
• More carbon dioxide (CO2) being
released in the atmosphere traps
more heat.

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How do we reduce air pollutants?

• Hybrid cars
• EPA government regulation
• Alternative fuels
• Walk, bike or use public transportation

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 Land Quality
• Land pollution: Destruction of the Earth’s
surface caused by human activities and the
misuse of natural resources.
• Natural resources: Land and raw materials
that exist naturally in the environment
undisturbed by humans.
• Renewable resource: A natural resource
that can be replaced by a natural process.
• Non-renewable resource: A natural
resource that cannot be produced or re-
grown or reused.
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Examples

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 What problems arise from land pollution

Acid mine drainage Landfills

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 Water Quality
• Refers to the chemical, physical, biological, and
radiological characteristics of water.
• Defined as:
The presence of impurities in water in such
quantity and of such nature as to impair the use
of the water for a stated purpose.

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 Water Pollution

• Sewage (Waste Water) Sewage is another name for

waste water from domestic and industrial processes.
• Agricultural Pollution. The agriculture industry covers
76% of the land area of England and Wales.
• Oil Pollution.
• Radioactive Substances.
• River dumping.
• Marine Dumping.

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Water Pollution cont’d..

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 How to reduce water pollution
• Recyclable Options:
If there are two options for a particular item, pick the one that
is easily recyclable. Glass bottles are much better for
the environment than plastic, for example.
• Do Not Dispose of Oils in the Sink:
While there is nothing wrong with consuming oils in your food,
or applying them on your body, it is a bad idea to dispose of oils
in the sink. It is better to dispose of oils in the garbage, or collect
all your excess oil in one bottle and then throw that away.

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Cont’d..
• Cleaning Chemicals:
Similar to oils, cleaning chemicals are hazardous
when they enter the water supply. If you are
emptying out containers of household cleaning
supplies, do it in the trash can not the sink.
• Do not Throw Away Medicines:
Never throw away medicines in the water supply
either. Even if you have whole pills that you do not
need, it is a bad idea to flush them down the toilet
or crush them in your kitchen sink disposal.

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 Cont’d..
• Use Less Plastic:
It is very difficult to break down plastic after it is produced.
Much of the plastic we consume ends up in the world’s water
supply, where it is even harder to fish out and safely throw
away.
If you can use as few plastic items as possible, you are
helping the environment. 
Plastic waste also spreads decay in the water supply.
• Reuse items:
Whenever you buy something that is not recyclable, such as
plastic, it is better to reuse this item as many times as
possible. This limits your consumption and means less of
those products will end up in the world’s rivers, lakes and
oceans.

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 Example

Answer:

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 Water Scarcity
Is a situation where there is insufficient water to satisfy normal human
requirements,
Defined by the World Health Organization(WHO) as a water source
with 20 L/person/day within 1km distance,
• If annual water supplies drop below 1700m3/person a country
experiencing water stress,
• If the annual water supplies drop below 1000 m3/person, the
country is defined as water scarcity.
•There are more than 215 major rivers and 300 groundwater aquifers
shared by two or more countries (water is expected to be a source of
both tension and cooperation in the future).
•Finding sustainable solutions to water infrastructure problems is a
huge challenge for engineers.

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 Jordan Water Crisis
• As one of the driest countries in the world,
Jordan faces a deepening water crisis. The
Jordanian population is among the most
water-deprived globally, with a water
availability of just 145 m3 per person per
year (2010), 120 m3 (2020)– a figure that is
projected to drop to just 91 m3 by 2025.
• Internationally, a water availability below
1,000 m3 per person per year is defined as
water scarcity, while below 500 m3 is
considered “absolute scarcity”.
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 Water Supply and Demand
• Jordan’s lack of water resources impacts the
country’s economic growth, political stability
and national security, but also public.
• Growing water demand in Jordan puts huge
pressure on the country’s water resources. 
• The gap between supply and demand has been
growing mainly due to rapid population growth,
the rising standard of living and agricultural
expansion. 

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 Water Deficit
• The deficit between water supply and
demand was estimated at 250 million cubic
meters (MCM) in 2000, increasing to 565
mcm in 2007.
• It is expected to reach about 630 MCM by
2025.

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 Renewable Resources in Jordan
• 

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 WATER SURFACE SOURCES
• There are fifteen surface water basins in Jordan. 
• The run-off varies significantly from year to
year as a result of the variation in the rainfall. 
• The three main surface water sources in Jordan
are:
1) Jordan river
2) Yarmouk river 
3) Zarqa river.

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Jordan River

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