2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The United Nation's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development represents a global commitment to addressing the world's most pressing economic, social, and environmental challenges with 17 goals. Specifically, goal 12 looks to address sustainable consumption and production patterns which has many ties to the chemical engineering field. Therefore, teaching chemical engineers to consider and evaluate the impacts of their designs on the environment, individuals, and society is imperative to achieve this sustainable development goal. This need has become so important that ABET has even began to include these considerations in student outcome 2, which currently includes the “…consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors.” In this work-in-progress paper, chemical engineering educators at two large, private, R1 universities present the ways they have introduced and engaged students in considering sustainability, and share sustainability-informed student learning outcomes that were assessed via surveys. Specifically, examples across three courses–a Material & Energy Balances course for sophomores, a senior capstone design course, and a senior elective on green chemical engineering–will be used to demonstrate how students learned and applied sustainability values through their engineering design projects.
Students in these courses will complete (or have already completed) a survey of self-assessed knowledge of the course learning outcomes from each design course before and after the courses. Data from these learning outcome surveys will inform how well the courses addressed sustainable topics, the outcomes for ABET outcome 2, and how the students felt about the applications of these topics in the courses. The following questions will be addressed: (1) How can we better address sustainability topics into chemical engineering courses? (2) How could we implement sustainability topics throughout the chemical engineering curriculum to improve students understanding of the need and ability to apply these topics?