We need to educate and train current generation engineers, managers, business owners, and policy makers with the skills and knowledge they need to be our champion stewards of environmental management and expert on lean manufacturing of major industries demonstrating ZDZE operations. Engineers have always faced design constraints. Historically, these constraints were the laws of physics, availability of materials, and energy. Modern engineers still face the limitation of the laws of physics but have been granted larger amounts of energy and a wide variety of materials. Modern society has added design parameters that include safety, durability, convenience, regulatory compliance, attractiveness, and price.
A true engineer does not view regulation as an obstruction, but rather as a design constraint like efficiency and durability. The goal has always been to develop the optimal design within given constraints, whether they are the laws of nature or society. Unfortunately, the actions of our modern society have placed undue burdens on nature. Nature’s ability to absorb excessive amounts of pollutants and stressors while still providing critical services of acceptable water quality, clean air, food, and biodiversity is limited.
Industrial ecology is Western society’s response to meeting the challenge of sustainable development. To manufacturers falls the challenge of attaining Zero Emissions. They in turn pass this directive to their engineers. To engineers, the advance of technology has meant increasing degrees of freedom with regard to design. The collective body of knowledge and our harnessing of materials and energy has been the source of these freedoms. Safety was the first man‐made design constraint that society imposed under the name of social good. Engineers responded to meet the challenge. Now society recognizes the need to impose a design parameter of Zero Emissions. Engineers will meet this challenge and accept it as they have the laws of physics – as a given.
Codes of Ethics in Engineering
Codes of ethics state the moral responsibilities of engineers as seen by the profession, and as represented by a professional society. Because they express the profession’s collective commitment to ethics, codes are enormously important, not only in stressing engineers’ responsibilities but also the freedom to exercise them.
Codes of ethics play at least eight essential roles: serving and protecting the public, providing guidance, offering inspiration, establishing shared standards, supporting responsible professionals, contributing to education, deterring wrongdoing, and strengthening a profession’s image
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