(299e) Sustainable Integration of Sustainability Into Senior Design for Chemical Engineers

This work discusses how to sustainably introduce topics, particularly those regarding sustainability, into a senior design course series for chemical engineers.  Historically, a life cycle assessment (LCA)/sustainability senior/graduate student elective had been created and offered to chemical engineering students at the University of Arizona.  This elective course introduced LCA, green chemistry, atom economy, and inherent technology trade-off evaluation in an open discussion format with guided projects to evaluate technologies.  The bulk of this material was subsequently folded into a "traditional" chemical engineering senior design course without a lot of other content through incorporation of the topics into existing projects and a re-balancing of course materials.  The materials were offered for five years before a change of instructors involved in the courses could have impacted the continuation of offering the sustainability topics.

The use of archival recorded lectures, along with clear communication of topical content on sustainability allowed the new instructor to seamlessly pick up and offer the content that was outside of their prior knowledge domain.  In particular, concept mapping strategies allowed students to quickly build an approach for handling the complexities of the design process while allowing them to have time to incorporate sustainability topics.  In the second course in the design series, students are required to evaluate their designed process for sustainability regarding environmental constraints.  Student evaluations and comments favorably indicate that the approaches used and the technical sustainability content are valued.  Additionally, employer surveys show that students have a strong awareness of environmental topics and how to approach sustainability issues.