Chapter 18
Until this century, engineers designed for an infinite world: water was always available, and waste could be freely discharged. Now we have to work within finite planetary limits. Your job, as an engineer, is to help re-engineer our human civilisation as we transition to genuine sustainability. Engineers are some of the most influential people in making this happen.
Until recently, few if any companies would invest in engineering to improve environmental sustainability without a quantified business case: profitability had to be guaranteed. Now, most leading companies are demanding that their engineers find sustainable solutions, reducing or even eliminating net greenhouse gas emissions, improving energy efficiency, and minimising natural resource consumption, while maintaining preferably increasing profits. These companies have found that people will pay more for products produced in a genuinely sustainable enterprise, and they also know that governments are likely to lurch unpredictably to tighter environmental regulation with every natural disaster linked with climate change. Longer-term economic sustainability means anticipating these changes and taking advantage of profitable opportunities created by companies that don’t manage to keep up.
Even though politicians are reacting slowly to this new reality, others realise that we have to change. Banks are increasingly anxious to provide finance for projects that respect sustainability goals. They know that if the world’s media learn of toxic waste discharges from community activists armed with low-cost, yet sensitive instruments purchased online, it won’t be long before reporters ask who provided the finance. They fear consumer boycotts in wealthy countries that can damage their reputation and limit their ability to raise finance for new projects. Banks have already, in effect, cut off finance for coal-fired electricity generators because they insist on loans being repaid in just a few years. They reckon it is unlikely that these plants will be allowed to operate after a few years without severe restrictions.
Unless you were very fortunate, your engineering school has not prepared you very well for these changes because it’s difficult for faculty staff to keep up while an understanding of human influences and behaviour is critical for success. Most engineering schools provide little if any teaching on how behaviour and technology both shape sustainability. Human decisions influence sustainability everywhere, whether to turn an air conditioner on or off, buy a car, or decide on a building design.
Now it is up to you, as an engineer, to join the effort to achieve this huge transformation. Mostly it will be a long series of small improvements over the next three or four decades—your entire working career. It’s the best time in generations to be an engineer; the world is increasingly desperate for your services. However, you need to be able to deliver results, something that you can’t learn at university. That’s why this book is so important.
One aspect of this transformation will be eliminating net greenhouse emissions: CO2 (carbon dioxide), CH4 (methane), and other gases.
Climate change
The essence of the December 2015 Paris climate agreement was to sufficiently limit greenhouse emissions to cap global warming at an estimated 1.5°C, if possible, and at no more than 2°C. Delegates also asked the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to prepare a special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and a comparison with 2°C of warming (Figure 18.1).
Figure 18.1 Expected climate warming, showing a range of warming from different climate models as different preventative measures are gradually put into effect.1
The findings revealed that 2°C of warming would bring unacceptable risks of irreversible damage to global ecosystems. They recommended an earlier cap on emissions to restrict warming to 1.5°C.
The clock (Figure 18.2) shows where we are today; we have to slow the clock before it reaches midnight to give ourselves more time to adjust.
Figure 18.2 Count down to 1.5°C warming. When the minute hand of this clock reaches midnight, we will have discharged enough greenhouse gases. We can slow the clock by reducing emissions.
This requires a rapid reduction in CO2 and other greenhouses gas emissions into the atmosphere, as shown in Figure 18.3.
Figure 18.3 IPCC recommendations for emission reduction, reaching zero net emissions by 2045. Otherwise, greenhouse gas capture from the atmosphere will be needed as part of the solution. As yet, we don’t have large-scale solutions for that.
Energy efficiency—using less material and energy to achieve desired outcomes—can provide as much as half of the necessary reductions, saving everyone money and effort. The remaining reductions will come from new methods that eliminate greenhouse emissions completely.
It should be noted that global warming targets are based on a 50% probability, and there is still a wide range of uncertainty in climate models. Normally, engineering decision-makers would regard a 50% chance of staying within a given environmental limit as an unacceptable risk; they would instead require at least a 99.99% chance. However, according to the best modelling available, we have already exceeded our atmospheric carbon budget for a 90% chance that climate warming does not exceed 1.5°C.
UN sustainable development goals
However, there are many other aspects of sustainability. In 2015, the United Nations adopted 17 ‘sustainable development goals’ (SDGs) that cover all aspects of human civilisation and our natural environment, such as ensuring that plastic waste is biodegradable, cleaning rather than polluting air and water, reducing consumption of non-renewable resources while improving life for everyone. These are projects that will increasingly attract investment finance because they help us achieve SDGs. In wealthy countries, the emphasis will be on reducing resource consumption, recycling waste into useful products, and making more use of biological materials from renewable sources that can be reabsorbed into the natural environment. In low-income countries, the focus will be on improving productivity as well, which takes us back to the definition of engineering at the start of this book: enabling people to do much more with less. Many of these solutions will eventually be cheaper and safer; we will wonder why we didn’t change sooner (Figure 18.4).
Figure 18.4 The UN sustainable development goals.
The challenge for many engineers will be to help clients take a leap of faith into this new world, rather than simply choosing the lowest cost option in accordance with the minimum permitted environmental standards.
Overcoming resistance to change
What if the company does not adopt this sustainability imperative?
Engineers face similar challenges with health and safety standards, particularly in some Middle Eastern and Asian countries. Owners are keen to minimise what they see as an unnecessary expense, especially when their competitors adopt similar practices.
These situations can present difficult ethical choices for engineers. When they are aware of practices that, even if legal, present serious health or environmental risks, then there is an ethical responsibility to inform the local community to help it realise what is happening. However, disseminating information that their employer regards as commercial secrets could lead to dismissal or even prosecution. In some regions, retribution can occur through non-legal means. Journalists can simply be beaten up by thugs, and families may be threatened when powerful people want to prevent further disclosures.
Apart from resigning, there are other options for engineers in these situations. Sometimes there are solutions where technical or commercial practices can be changed, providing large payoffs for the firm, the community, and the planet.
Here’s an example. In the early 2000s, a Brisbane engineer at a food and beverage processing plant saw an opportunity to recycle wastewater…
It took ages, but we finally convinced our management to install a reverse osmosis plant so that we could recycle process water, enormously reducing our consumption and also significantly reducing biological nutrient discharge into the waste stream. Both of these were significant gains for environmental sustainability. It took several years, because the management would not compromise on seeking a 25% return on investment. We tried several ways to make the necessary business case before it was finally accepted. Sometime after we installed the reverse osmosis plant, the city water supply was drastically curtailed because of drought. Our competitors had to close down their production lines because they were consuming too much water; they had to import products instead and sell them at a loss to maintain their market presence. We were able to continue at full production and made huge profits, repaying the reverse osmosis investment by several hundred percent. In retrospect, we should have based our case on the risk of water restrictions—it would have been accepted much more readily.
This account and many others like it show how unpredictable but foreseeable events can completely change commercial priorities, and it demonstrates how an engineer can argue for lifting health, safety, and environmental standards on the grounds of risk management, or even opportunities for large profits. Pursuing these options requires sustained persistence because it takes time for most business owners to recognise the commercial opportunities. Figure 4.1 is useful for understanding this reluctance. It takes time for someone who has not seen the dog in the right-hand picture to notice it. Many people will never see it without help.
Most business decisions assume that the economic conditions today are going to persist in the future. However, recent history demonstrates that this is a false assumption. Inflation in Australia today is around 1.7%. In the 5 years after I graduated, inflation increased from 3% to 18%! Housing loan interest rates today are about 4%, yet in 1989 they were 17.5%. Today’s oil price is about USD 20, down from USD 60 when I started writing this book. Yet it rose from USD 25 in 2002 to USD 145 in 2008 (Figures 18.5–18.7).
Figure 18.5 Australian retail price inflation. (World Bank data, accessed April 10, 2020.)
Figure 18.6 Interest rates in Australia (Data from Reserve Bank of Australia). Note that policy changes have altered the relationship between the overnight cash rate and the housing interest rate over time (Cash rate data from https://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/historical-data.htm, interest rate data from https://www.loansense.com.au/historical-rates.html, accessed April 10, 2020).
Figure 18.7 US crude oil price since 1987. A few days after creating this graph, the price was briefly negative. (http://www.eia.gov/, accessed April 10, 2020.)
Most engineering projects take around 5 years to complete from initial discussions, and these graphs show how much has changed in recent times. In addition, we can expect more regulatory changes in the coming decades. Disasters such as the recent bushfires in Australia and the Coronavirus outbreak will force governments to change policies. Therefore, it makes sense to anticipate change; projects designed for sustainability and resilience in the face of economic, regulatory, and environmental changes will provide more consistent investment returns for their owners.
Renewable energy
One of the greatest changes influencing engineering projects will be energy supplies. For more than a century, engineers have relied on fossil fuels and electricity grids to provide cheap energy on demand at stable, predictable prices. Now, the cheapest energy sources in Australia and many other countries are solar and wind-generated electricity. However, supplies are variable: the price can vary by a factor of 1,000 or more in just a few hours. Therefore, smart engineers are designing systems to take advantage of cheap solar electricity in the daytime, when prices can be zero, or sometimes even negative. One option is to design processes to operate at variable rates, slowing when energy supplies are reduced and prices rise. Another is to design processes to store cheap energy when it’s available, sometimes in a different form. For example, a desalination plant can operate at full speed when cheap solar electricity is available, and store excess water in reservoirs for times when electricity prices are high. The stored water is equivalent to stored electric energy. Electrolysers can produce hydrogen and oxygen from water. The hydrogen can be transported long distances as liquid ammonia, and special membranes allow the hydrogen to be released as a fuel when needed.
Efficiency gains, new ideas, or behaviour change?
Efficiency gains will provide easy improvements with economic gains from energy and material savings. However, these alone will not be enough.
New ideas, often coupled with old ideas that have been around for centuries, can yield much larger improvements. Solutions like electric throw rugs for winter warmth, or fans and personal air conditioners for summer cooling, can provide comfort in extreme temperatures, using far less energy and material resources than heating or cooling entire buildings. Our current inefficient building heating and cooling systems consume as much as 30% of the world’s energy, yet they provide comfort for only a minority of people on the planet. Once we leave behind the need to heat or cool a whole building, older low-cost construction methods become attractive once again, with more modest material requirements.
Ultimately, however, sustainability also relies on human behaviour. Common, shared resources such as the atmosphere, oceans, underground water reservoirs, and even forests and pasture must be managed cooperatively. Government regulation helps influence behaviour, especially if monitoring is feasible, enabling enforcement and deterring selfish behaviour. Engineers have a crucial role, deploying distributed networks of sensors coupled with satellites and global communication systems to monitor shared environmental resources. Even in the absence of effective governance, a reality in most low-income countries and sparsely populated regions, accurate monitoring of the state of the natural environment can provide data needed to motivate community-level responses and enable global networks of non-government organisations to target rogue players with effective sanctions. For example, the web site earth.nullschool.net and many others provide increasingly useful data on pollutants such as SO2. Emissions of CFC refrigerants can also be monitored from space.
Mobile phone systems, especially in low-income countries, have become a trusted channel for financial transactions. As long as we can predict the capacity of shared resources, therefore, mobile networks with sensor networks could provide the means to govern access to shared resources. Mobile networks have proved to be remarkably effective without the need for expensive social institutions, such as extensive policing, to enforce payment by delinquent users.
We now know that Australian aboriginal people managed a sparsely populated continent with relatively infertile soils for at least 50,000 years using controlled burning. Their remarkable sustainability perhaps reflects their culture. Their notion of ‘country’, the area of land occupied by a tribal group, is very different from other cultures. ‘Country’ includes not only the land, sub-surface and air above but also the human inhabitants and animals. Any disturbance to ‘country’, therefore, is also a disturbance to people: it is a single organism or system. In most cultures, particularly our West European culture, the ‘environment’ is something that is distinct from humans. We talk of polluting the environment and miss the connection that we are simultaneously polluting ourselves.
Of course, it would be quite unrealistic to wait while we change human culture to embrace such connections: we have to act in the next two decades, so engineering solutions will be critical.
Opportunities
While new technologies can help, and in some cases will be essential, it’s important to recognise that new technologies typically take 30–40 years from initial demonstrations to widespread adoption. Therefore, our sustainability transformation will mostly rely on existing technologies. There is a huge variety to choose from: all I can do in this final section is mention a few interesting examples.
In pursuing sustainable solutions, we cannot ignore today’s inequalities: commercial solutions that reduce or eliminate inequalities (mobile phones, for example) are likely to be more sustainable than solutions that require wealth transfers through government agencies to offset any resulting wealth inequalities.
Access to piped water today relies on manually read meters and centralised government agencies to enforce payment. In low-income countries, piped water networks are mostly in a chronic downward spiral where contamination and poor service quality cause reluctance by users to pay their bills. Low revenue collections straining finances and low engineering productivity combine to undermine maintenance, resulting in more contamination and lower service quality. Users are forced to adopt expensive alternatives to obtain safe drinking water, such as purified water in 20 L bottles. The result: safe drinking water across South Asia can cost 10–30 times as much as in wealthy countries like Australia.
Alternative systems incorporating sensor networks and mobile phone payment systems should be commercially feasible and provide safe drinking water at a similar cost as in wealthy countries, potentially a huge improvement and commercial opportunity.
Non-sewered toilets can avoid the current practice where huge quantities of purified water are used just to transport human waste to treatment plants. Several new technologies are being tested and, optimistically, could be deployed in the next decade on a large scale.
While refrigeration and plastic packaging has enormously reduced food wastage in wealthy countries, we now have a plastic pollution headache. Low-income countries have to grow far more food than they eat because of high wastage in storage, processing, and distribution. The obvious solution is biologically friendly food packaging technologies that provide appropriate food preservation without long-lived pollution.
Pay-as-you-go technologies relying on mobile payment systems could enable farmers and small businesses to acquire expensive refrigeration systems that can further reduce food wastage. Bank finance taken for granted in wealthy countries relies on highly skilled people working in costly networks of retail bank branches, and there are not enough highly educated people to provide these services in low-income countries.
The most attractive opportunities to make technological improvements often become apparent only when you can think about the wider context in which technologies are used. Understanding cultural, economic, social, and governance factors, and trust in technologies, can lead to transformative innovations. However, this ability to think ‘outside the box’ must be complemented with the consistent application of systematic engineering methods, to ensure that all the technical details are resolved so that the expected benefits are realised.
You now have most of the knowledge you need to grasp these amazing opportunities. The one resource that will always be in short supply is your personal time; managing that is the subject of the next chapter.
References and Further Reading
Hardisty, P. E. (2010). Environmental and Economic Sustainability. Boca Raton, FL: CRC - Taylor & Francis.
Trevelyan, J. P. (2014). The Making of an Expert Engineer. London: CRC Press/Balkema - Taylor & Francis, Chapter 12.