Objectives

As specific objectives, by the end of the course students should be able to:

• Appreciate the scale of the global challenges in energy production and control of climate change, and the importance of identifying, quantifying and pursuing the developments which will have significant impact.
• Understand a range of opportunities to reduce energy consumption and to implement lower carbon technologies, in different sectors of engineering, in both developed and developing economies.
• Complete a technical investigation into an aspect of Sustainable Engineering of their own choice.

Content

The need to move rapidly toward a lower carbon economy is widely accepted in the Engineering community, to mitigate against climate change, to improve future energy security, and to assist the developing economies of the world. This course will illustrate some of the current issues and applied developments relating to sustainability, in all areas of Engineering. Students follow up the lecture course with their own short research project over the Christmas vacation, submitted as a poster.

1. 29 October. Professor Julian Allwood. Absolute Zero: a pragmatic view of how the UK can deliver on its zero-emissions legal commitment within 29 years

For the past twenty years, we have recognised that climate change is a pressing threat, discussed it endlessly, but every year emissions have risen.  One of the key reasons for this lack of urgency is the hope that new technologies will take the problem away, or at least make it easier to deal with, than if we act now. Obviously, it suits politicians and incumbent businesses to delay acting, in the hope that future action will require less change.  However, we now have just 29 years left to reach zero emissions, and it is relatively unlikely that any new large-scale technologies will have much effect, because it takes a long time to introduce and deploy them.  In this talk, we’ll therefore look in detail at what it would take to reach zero emissions with today’s technologies, and explore the commercial and political context in which decisions about climate mitigation are being played out.

2. 5 November. Dr André Cabrera Serrenho. Are electric cars really zero-emissions? — key principles of technology implementation to step up climate change mitigation

3. 12 November. Dr Claire Barlow. Plastics: a wicked problem

Lightweight, versatile, cheap and hygienic: plastics have transformed our world in the last half century, pervading all aspects of our lives and bringing countless benefits. But their durability, which can be such a valuable attribute, is also their downfall. David Attenborough’s Blue Planet documentaries have highlighted  the devastating effect that waste plastic is having on our environment, particularly focusing on the marine environment. Plastic packaging is seen as iconic of our wasteful throwaway society: should it just be banned?  A more thoughtful approach to the problem requires us to see packaging as part of a complex system, and to consider resource usage across the whole lifecycle of materials and products: used and disposed of wisely, packaging can save huge amounts of resources. In this lecture we will explore wider sustainability aspects of the use of plastics for packaging and examine the alternatives.

4. 19 November. Dr Shaun Fitzgerald. Sustainable buildings

In this session we will first quickly look at the forecast for CO2 emissions under different scenarios, and then delve into the demand which is driving these. Energy use associated with the operation of buildings accounts for the highest forecast growth of any sector, and we will therefore examine some opportunities to reduce this. The session will highlight how we can apply engineering principles and help transform the energy consumption of buildings. We will discuss not just how improvements in our understanding of buildings physics can lead to potential improvements, but use examples from industry and explore some of the barriers which engineers have to overcome in practice. These include working with complete supply chains, understanding the pressures involved, the practical issues of building regulations/guidelines and how these have been changed and can be developed further by you.

5. 26 November. Dr Kristen McAskill. United Nations sustainability goals

This session will provide an overview of the Sustainable Development Goals and the significance of these goals in coalescing an international agenda for sustainable development. To put these goals into context, it will include a short historic review of international coordination and policy. It will consider responsibilities for achieving these goals and implications for the engineering profession. The session will briefly explore examples of how engineering practices have evolved in response to the sustainability agenda and take a brief look at how some professional engineering institutions are now responding.