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Sustainability and Sustainable Technologies fo a Better World
Citation:
Sikdar, S. Sustainability and Sustainable Technologies fo a Better World. Presented at IWA AsiaPacific Young Water Professionals' Conference, Tokyo, JAPAN, December 07 - 11, 2012.
Impact/Purpose:
A keynote speech at the 4th IWA Asia-Pacific Young Water Professionals' conference, Tokyo, Japan
Description:
Sustainability and Sustainable Technologies for a Better World Subhas K. Sikdar National Risk Management Research Laboratory United States Environmental protection Agency 26 W. M.L. King Dr. Cincinnati, OH 45237 Sikdar.subhas@epa.gov ABSTRACT Students of engineering and applied sciences who are in schools and colleges now are in a time when words like “sustainability” and “sustainable development” are being used frequently in common discourses. Politicians, urban leaders, city managers, Non-Governmental Organizations, and multinational business establishments alike have been promoting the idea of sustainability. Often these disparate groups have different ideas about sustainability and sustainable development. On one point all seem to agree, i.e., the rate of current natural resource depletion to satisfy our ever growing needs is unsustainable. These groups however have different ideas about the solution prescriptions for a sustainable world. In engineering and applied sciences, solutions are generally not for global sustainability but for local sustainability for a duration. To examine the paths toward sustainable technologies, one has to think in terms of systems, because products do have life cycle history and an end of life story, all of which can have impacts on the environment, society, and on the economic wellbeing. Scales of systems determine the type of indicators one will use to evaluate the sustainability of a system. These indicators need to be selected and determined quantitatively. Finally a judgment has to be made regarding relative sustainability of the system under consideration, so that further action can be taken to make improvement by various technical means, such as process development or modification. In this lecture, all of these ideas will be elaborated so that the today’s students can become tomorrow’s innovators for sustainable technologies.