Sustainable Engineering Education

The University of Texas at Austin, Carnegie Mellon University and Arizona State University established the Center for Sustainable Engineering in 2005. The overall goal of the Center is to develop, disseminate and support educational materials related to incorporating sustainability into engineering curricula.

One of the first steps undertaken by the Center has been to benchmark how engineering departments and programs, through out the United States, have incorporated sustainability into their curricula. This presentation will describe the results of that benchmarking activity. The benchmarking assessed activities ranging from the development of course modules, through the development of complete courses, to the creation of department and college-wide programs. Activities at all of these levels are expanding rapidly, and the approaches being used are heterogeneous. Nevertheless, common themes emerge, which will be summarized in the presentation.