Towards Engineering for Sustainability

摘要

Traditional engineering is a process of maximizing utility while minimizing cost to the client. Engineering for Sustainability must vastly expand these concepts to become a process of 'maximizing social benefit while minimizing negative ecological impact'. This paper explores the descriptions surrounding Sustainable Development, and completes them sufficiently to include units of measure for Sustainable Technological Development. The method to measure how Sustainable any Technological Development proposal would be is derived from these definitions, and from that method, the most Sustainable alternative can be determined. This paper introduces a relationship between the time it takes for members of a community to meet their needs and the resources consumed by the community. Canadian data is presented to provide an example of this curve. Each community, regardless of scale, will have a unique relationship due to their own assets and aspirations. This approach focuses on the efficiency by which people use their time to meet their needs. It does not address the effectiveness of how people use their time to meet their needs. The proposed method uses this relationship to convert excessive resource consumption into a time cost to the community. A Life Cycle Analysis is undertaken for each alternative design, using human time as the unit of measure. Any alternative that produces a positive net time benefit to the community is Sustainable. The alternative that produces the maximum net time benefit to the community is the most Sustainable.