Green Engineering

- design, discovery and implementation of engineering solutions with an awareness of potential benefits
and problems in terms of the environment, the economy and society throughout the lifestyle of the
design

12 Principles of Green Engineering

 Inherent Rather Than Circumstantial

Designers need to strive to ensure that all materials and energy inputs and outputs are as inherently
nonhazardous as possible.

 Prevention Instead of Treatment

It is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean up waste after it is formed.

 Design for Separation

Separation and purification operations should be designed to minimize energy consumption and
materials use.

 Maximize Efficiency
Products, processes, and systems should be designed to maximize mass, energy, space, and time
efficiency.

 Output-Pulled Versus Input-Pushed

Products, processes, and systems should be "output pulled" rather than "input pushed" through the use of
energy and materials.

 Conserve Complexity
Embedded entropy and complexity must be viewed as an investment when making design choices on
recycle, reuse, or beneficial disposition.

 Durability Rather Than Immortality

Targeted durability, not immortality, should be a design goal.

 Meet Need, Minimize Excess

Design for unnecessary capacity or capability (e.g., "one size fits all") solutions should be considered a
design flaw.

 Minimize Material Diversity

Material diversity in multicomponent products should be minimized to promote disassembly and value
retention.

 Integrate Material and Energy Flows

Design of products, processes, and systems must include integration and interconnectivity with available
energy and materials flows.

 Design for Commercial "Afterlife"

Products, processes, and systems should be designed for performance in a commercial "afterlife."

 Renewable Rather Than Depleting

Material and energy inputs should be renewable rather than depleting.
Design
 engineering stage where the greatest influence can be achieved in terms of sustainable outcomes.
 Time for innovation, brainstorming and creativity, offering to integrate sustainability goals into the
specifications of the product, process or system
 to incorporate increased efficiency; reduce the waste of water, materials and energy; reduce costs
and, most importantly, provide new performances and capabilities.

If the degrees of freedom within the system can be increased, more benefits can be realized.

At this point, the engineer needs to have a vision of the future regarding how these materials will be
maintained, what cleaning agents will be used, what the water and energy demands of the construction will be,
what will happen to the construction after it has finished its useful life, and what will be the destiny of these
materials at the end of the life of the construction.

7.3 Prevention of pollution, design for the environment, industrial ecology, sustainability

Green engineering aims to refocus on efficient and sustainable designs.

Prevention of pollution
 focused on increasing the efficiency of a process to reduce the amount of pollution generated.
 idea of incrementalism or eco-efficiency, where the current system is adjusted to be better than
before.

Pollution prevention law of 1990

 focused its attention on industry, government and public on reducing the amount of pollution
through effective changes in cost in the production, operation and use of raw materials

 Source reduction-Waste (hazardous substance, toxic agent or contaminant) must be avoided from
the source (before recycling, treatment or disposal).

 Recycling- The waste generated must be reused either in the process in which it was created or in
another process.
 Treatment -Waste that can not be recycled must be treated to reduce its risk.
 Disposition -Waste that is not treated must be disposed of in an environmentally sound manner.

Waste minimization
- a process of elimination that involves reducing the amount of waste produced in society and helps to
eliminate the generation of harmful and persistent wastes, supporting the efforts to promote a more
sustainable society.
  If waste creation can not be avoided under certain conditions or circumstances, designers and
engineers may consider alternative mechanisms to effectively exploit these resources for value-
added purposes.
Eg. The waste could be beneficially used as a feedstock.

 The recovery of waste as a feedstock represents potential environmental and economic benefits.

Industrial ecology
- Shifting of industrial proceses from linear systems (type1) in which resource and capital investments
move through the system to become waste, to ecological closed-loop system where waste become input
for new processes (type3)

Unlimited Unlimited
Organism
Resource waste

Energy and Limited

limited waste
resource

Energy

Scheme of ecosystems type 1, 2 and 3 In this ecosystem, the waste is recycled back into the system. a) The type
1 ecosystem is a traditional industrial system where the investments of resources and capital move through a
system to become waste. b) The type 2 ecosystem has some cycle and generates some waste. c) The type 3
ecosystem is a closed return system where waste becomes inputs for new processes.

Design for the environment (DFE) or eco-design

- An approach to design in which environmental burdens are intentionally considered and eliminated
wherever possible in the design phase.

Design strategies for the environment (DFE) for the elimination of environmental burdens
• Changes in the selection of materials
• Changes in equipment selection; Improved purchase options
• Improved operating practices
• Improved recovery and disposal practices
• Improved logistics

7.4 Fundamental Concepts

7.4.1. Green Chemistry

- defined as the design of products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of
dangerous substances
- focuses at the molecular level to design chemicals and materials to be inherently nonhazardous
- to reduce intrinsic hazard, to improve material and energy efficiency and to ingrain cycle perspective

The final goal would be completely benign materials or chemicals. That is, chemicals and materials would not
cause harm if they were released into the environment or human beings were exposed to them.
7.4.2. Life cycle considerations take into account the environmental performance of a product, process, or
system through all phases from acquisition of raw materials to refining those materials, manufacturing, use and
end-of-life management.
In the case of engineering infrastructure, the life stages would be site development, materials, and product
delivery, infrastructure manufacture, infrastructure use, and refurbishment, recycling, and disposal. In some
cases transportation impacts are also considered.
 Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The idea of life cycle considerations is to protect against
applying green engineering and sustainable design on just one life cycle stage.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a sophisticated way of examining the total environmental impact
through every life cycle stage.

Steps in performing an LCA

1. Define the goal and scope. The goal states the intended application and audience, while the scope of
the study defines the function or functional unit, serves as the basis of the LCA being evaluated.
2. Conduct an Inventory analysis. It involves describing all of the inputs and outputs in a product’s life
cycle. The purpose of this is to quantify what comes in and what goes out, including the energy and
material associated with each stage in the life cycle.
3. Conduct an impact assessment. It involves identifying all environmental impacts associated with the
inputs and outputs detailed in the inventory analysis. This step often involves some assumptions about
what human health and environmental impacts will result from a given emission scenario, which is
similar to a risk assessment.

 Economic Life Cycle Assessment: Life Cycle Costing. A financial analysis can look at costs across the
life cycle of a product, process, or system.

Life cycle cost (LCC) is known as the total cost of ownership. When performing analysis on LCC, it is
important to put all the costs and/revenues that occur the year as a single year-end amounts.

The value of money from different time periods can be adjusted using an interest rate.
Interest is the fee paid to borrow money, since the money being used in the present is not available for
other expenditures or investments.
Principal is the original amount lent or spent.
If interest is paid annually and the time period is greater than a year, the interest is said to be
compounded.

 Beyond Environmental and Economic Life Cycle Considerations. Intangible costs and benefits include
reputation, brand value, potential liability, stock performance, societal and quality –of-life benefits,
stakeholder support, client and employee loyalty, innovation, and leadership.

7.4.3 System thinking considers component parts of a system as having added characteristics or features when
functioning within a system rather that isolated alone.
Systems as a whole can be better understood when the linkages and interactions between components are
considered in addition to the individual components.
 Casual loop diagram (CLD). It provides a means to articulate the dynamic, interconnected nature of
complex systems.

- These diagram consists of arrows connecting variables in a way that shows how one variable affects
another.
- The arrow is labeled with s when the first variable changes, the second variable changes in the same
direction. And o means that the first variable causes a change in the opposite direction of the second
variables.
- Arrows come together to form loops and each loop is labeled with an R, or a B. R means
reinforcing, means that the casual relationship within the loop create exponential growth or
collapse. B means balancing, that is, the causal influences in the loop keep variables in equilibrium.
7.4.4 Resilience is the capacity of the system to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of unforeseen changes,
even catastrophic incidents (Fiskel, 2003). Resilience is a common feature of complex systems, such as
companies, cities, or ecosystems.
7.4.5 DESIGN CRITERIA
 Performance Criteria
- explicit goals that a design must achieve in order to be successful
- used to define the design standards
 The success of engineering strategies such as total quality management and six sigma suggests that
sustainability goals can be treated similarly.
In this way, sustainability goals can be incorporated into design evaluation as a minimum standard for
bringing the design to production or implementation.
 Viable designs
- defined as one that considers sustainability goals.
- prevents design that are inherently unsustainable at the design stage from moving forward.

7.4.6 PRODUCTS VERSUS SERVICES

 Creating physical entities to perform intended functions necessarily has an environmental and economic
burden. One significant mechanism to reduce these burdens is to provide the same service or function
without the creation of that physical entity.

Maintaining Function While Reducing Resource Consumption

Three Processes Examined to Decaffeinate Coffee

Producing decaffeinated coffee by

using methylene chloride as a
solvent in the process

Producing decaffeinated coffee by

using supercritical carbon dioxide as
the solvent

Producing decaffeinated coffee by

growing coffee plants with reduced
caffeine content

7.4.7 INHERENTLY BENIGN MATERIALS AND ENERGY THROUGH GREEN CHEMISTRY

 Green Chemistry – also called sustainable chemistry, is an area of chemistry and chemical engineering
focused on the designing of products and processes that minimize the use and generation of hazardous
substances.
 Green Chemistry encourages the use of renewable resources and locally available materials (to reduce
carbon dioxide emissions associated with transportation.
 Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) – is a design discipline that
studies nature’s best ideas and them imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.
  Color without paint: Organisms (such as butterflies and peacocks) use two methods to create
color: internal pigments and the structural color. These “colors” result form light scattering off
regularly spaced melanin rods, and interference effects through thin layers of keratin. Iridigin, in
San Francisco is using structural color ideas from tropical butterflies to create and PDA screen
that can be easily read in sunlight. In Japan, researchers are developing an LCD sign whose
structure can be set using UV light, then reset for a different message, all without ink.

 Staying clean without detergent: German scientists found that lotus leaves have mountainous
surfaces that keep dirt particles from adhering. A number of new products are available in self-
cleaning lotus-effect surfaces, including car paint and building façade paint. Lotusan self-
cleaning façade paint, dries with lotus-like bumps, and rainwater cleans the surface.

7.4.8 EFFICIENCY
 Designers no longer consider mass and energy to be the only goals for efficient use; now they also
consider space and time. This can be achieved through intensification of products and processes into
smaller, more distributed components.

 Computers and other electronic products

 E factor – is defined to measure the efficiency of various chemical industries in terms of kilograms of
material inputs relative to the kilogram of final product. A higher E factor means more waste and,
consequently, greater negative environmental impact. An E factor id determined by the following
equation:
∑ 𝑘𝑔 𝑖𝑛𝑝𝑢𝑡𝑠
𝐸 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟 =
∑ 𝑘𝑔 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑡

7.4.9 INTEGRATION OF LOCAL MATERIAL AND ENERGY FLOWS

 The Green Engineering principle of integrating material and energy flows is related to the earlier
discussions of industrial ecology and ecosystem types.

Figure 7.18 Schematic Diagram of

Eco-Industrial Park in Kalundborg,
Denmark, Depicting Material and
Energy Flows.

7.4.10 DESIGN FOR END-OF-LIFE HANDLING

 Design for Disassembly (DfD) – desisgning for the eventual dismantlement for recovery of systems,
components, and materials.
 DfD is intended to maximize economic value and minimize environmental impacts through reuse,
repair, remanufacture, and recycling.
 DfD enables flexibility, convertibility, upgradability, and expandability supporting efforts to avoid the
disposal of products or removal of buildings.
7.5 MEASURING SUSTAINABILITY
 Indicator
- something that points to an issue or condition
 - shows how well a system is working
 Characteristics of Effective Indicators
- Relevant
- Easy to understand
- Reliable
- Quantifiable
- Based on accessible data
 Sustainability Indicator
- measures the progress towards achieving a goal of sustainability
- should be a collection of indicator that represent the multidimensional nature of sustainability
7.6 POLICIES DRIVING GREEN ENGUNEERING AND SUSTAINABILITY
 Policies – often aimed at protecting the public good
 Green Chemistry and Green Engineering – often aimed at protecting human health and the environment.
Two Main Types of Policies that can Affect Engineering Design for Sustainability
1. Regulations – legal restriction promulgated by the government administrative agencies through
rulemaking supported by a threat of sanction or a fine.
- Two of the most established examples:
 Extended Product Responsibility (EPR) initiatives
Example: European Union’s (EU) Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directives
 Banning of specific substances
Example: European’s Union (EU) Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS)
2. Voluntary Programs – programs that are not mandated by law or enforceable but are meant to encourage
and motivate desirable behaviours.
- Two Types of Voluntary Programs that have been successfully established:
 Ecolabeling
- Attempt to provide an indicator to consumers of the product’s environmental performance
- Only companies that meet environmental standards for their specific products and service
can apply ecolabeling
 Preferential Purchasing or Environmental Preferable
- can be implemented by any organization and mandate a preference to purchase products
from office supplies to computers to industrial chemicals with improved environmental and
human heal profiles.
Reasons why companies adopt environmental purchasing policies:
1. Distinguishing a company and its products from other competitors
2. Avoiding hidden cost and pursuing cost savings
3. Increasing operating efficiency
4. Joining an industry or international market trend
5. Recognizing market preference; serving customers who have stated interest in
“environmental friendly” products and practices
Types of Savings Achieved through Environmental Preferential Purchasing
1. Reduced repair and replacement cost when using more durable and repairable equipment
2. Reduced disposal cost from generating less waste
3. Improves product design and performance
4. Increased employee safety and health at the facility
5. Reduced material cost for manufacturers
7.7 DESIGNING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
Applying the principles of green engineering and considering fundamental concepts of sustainability,
engineers can contribute to addressing the challenges associated with economic growth and development. This
new awareness provides potential to design better tomorrow.