Toward a new era for chemical engineering education: making environmental and ethical issues fundamental

Given the relationship between manufactured chemicals and environmental degradation, chemical engineers need to be acutely aware of the implications of their designs and their responsibilities. The best way to promote such awareness and responsibility is to make these issues an explicit part of undergraduate chemical engineering education. Such an expansion of the curriculum is supported by the new ABET Criteria 2000. This paper explores ABET and other reasons for incorporating environmental and ethical issues into chemical engineering education, and provides general recommendations for how his goal may be accomplished. Five factors that require chemical engineering graduates to be well-versed in environmental issues are outlined, and an analysis of ethics and responsibility for chemical engineers is performed. A pervasive approach to curricular change, in which environmental and ethical topics are integrated into many courses at all levels of education, is proposed.