Engineering for Sustainability: A Practical Guide for Sustainable Design

This book provides engineers with the necessary information to design sustainable processes, products and value chains. It describes the current consensus on sustainable development for four context levels: Planet, Society, Business, and Engineers. It also presents all required design steps: from problem definition, via synthesis of potential solutions, analysis of solutions, improvements to the final solution evaluation. For each design step, methods and guidelines are provided in relation to the goal of obtaining a sustainable solution; a solution that meets both the needs of people and all specific context constraints with regard to the planet and prosperity.

• Provides information on the current consensus on sustainable development for four context levels: Planet, Society, Business and Engineers
• Offers guidelines for analyzing problems and identifying the best solution for each problem as applicable to a specific situation
• Provides clear design procedures for implementation of a particular solution
• Helps engineers to come up with profitable designs which meet environmental constraints
• Presents the information that engineers need to meet energy, water, food, health, and other basic human needs

Dr. Jan Harmsen is currently consultant of Harmsen Consultancy B.V. From 1996 to 2010 he was Principal Process Developer, Shell Technology Center Amsterdam. After thirty-three years of industrial experience in exploratory research, development, process design, and chemicals manufacturing, ir. Harmsen now successfully works as an independent consultant on innovation with sustainable development in view. He has published three books with Elsevier.