THE PRINCIPLES OF GREEN ENGINEERING

Image used from Source 3. Go HERE to see my sources.

Sustainability, in the industrial sense, means that, as engineers design products and factories produce materials, two questions arise: What are the right goals? What are the right tools to achieve those goals? Approaching sustainability from a design perspective demonstrates a need to let go of current design systems and approach a fundamental shift to a sustainable one.

Conventional sustainability "too often suggests simply retrofitting the machines of industry with incrementally cleaner, more effecient engines" (SOURCE 4). A change in conventional systems may have the ability to increase capital and economic growth. OPerating systems of the natural world are unrivaled models for human design, and they operate on an infinitely solar energy source (SES).

Let me demonstrate the following analogy, supporting claims by both Fritjof Capra and Source 1:

The analogy...
1. Sustainable engineering should then approach closed-loop systems of energy and material flows. They will truly be sustainable then. This will allow for the reusability of manufacturing materials and energies within the system.

2. Fritjof Capra asserts that the environment operates completely from solar income, and that in its set of systems, entropy (the idea that all energy is not lost but flows from one component to another in a system--in consecutively less "efficient" forms, but still usable) means that waste can be fuel for another system.

3. "Design requires the ability to form mental images, and since this ability, as far as we know, is limited to humans and other great apes, there is no design in nature at large" (Capra, 120).

4. "This means that we need to describe the cell [a factory?] as an open system. Living systems are organizationally closed [a factory for sure]--they are autopoietic networks--but materially open [...the factory?...]"(Capra, 13).

5. "The dynamics of these dissipative structures specifically include the spontaneous arrangement of new forms of order. When the flow of energy increases, the system may encounter a point of instability, known as the 'bifurcation point'" (Capra, 13).

6. SO: sustainable development must not strive to mimic the natural world and its systems, which are (by coevolutionary changes through millions of years) inherently open. We should rather optimize the closed-loop systems of emergent structures and sustainable design processes so they coincide with natural system mechanics, but not destroy them in the long run

7. THEN, there would be nothing to use as an example.....and we would die.

The management of waste created in these systems is a limited goal; we need to go further.

When you recover the waste of materials and energy after one process, and then use it to "fuel" another, you can establish a longer product "afterlife" (SOURCE 4).