Team D22-010: Re-Tooling Sustainability

Purpose

This campaign has been designed in order to educate current engineers to the same level that students in engineering are at in terms of social responsibility.

Steps

In order to carry this out we have created a set of 3 steps that will be used:

• Education

• Ethical Toolkit

• Certification

Education

This section will be the starter for engineers in the industry to learn about the different effects of their projects. This will be delivered via lectures and seminars and will be company-specific in order to make them realise the actual effect that they have on the environment. This will hopefully make them realise that they need to design more responsibly and make them be more mindful of the communities they are affecting, materials they are designing with and the origins of the energy they use. Toolkit This will be distributed to these companies and comprises of a list of 7 areas that the engineers can be mindful of during the project. It allows them to rank the different areas in order to show where they are going to have the most effect and then they can use this list to minimise that effect. They will have to fill it out from start to finish to then show the improvement they have made in the responsibility of the project, and this should revolutionise and create a professional standard for the way that companies manage and design projects throughout all stages of the design process. The seven areas that have been chosen are:

• Disruption to communities during the project/lifecycle of the product  

• The long-lasting impact of the project/product at the end of its lifecycle  

• Using materials that are sustainable and manufactured in an ethical manner. 

• Communication with the community around the site of the project or end-users of the product. 

• Employing a diverse team to implement the project. 

• The well-being of the team involved 

• Will the energy used throughout the project be sustainable? 

We have chosen these 7 areas by looking at the UN’s 17 STGs and focussing on ones that are the most relevant to engineering projects. Certification

This step will create the incentive for companies to take part as it will create and be shown as an industry-standard way of doing things such as the British Kitemark to show how these projects have been carried out to a specific standard and that everything possible has been done to minimise the effect that their project has in the short term to long term on the environment. In order to implement this step, we would need to create a recognisable brand so that companies are forced to get involved on being pushed to the fringe in their sector.