2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This full paper presents findings from an evidence-based practice study evaluating a sustainability intervention in a polymer engineering course. The importance of sustainability in engineering practice is evident in calls from scientists, policy makers, and consumers for solutions that technically address current needs while accounting for the broader social and environmental impacts of a solution. At the authors’ own institution, they noticed sustainability has largely been incorporated into the curriculum through dedicated sustainability courses and that beyond these courses, there is limited coverage of sustainability in their departments' curriculum. The authors had the opportunity in the 2023-2024 academic year to participate in an on-campus community of practice centered on integrating sustainability into traditional engineering courses. As a result of their participation, the final project of an existing 400-level elective course in a chemical engineering department was converted into a sustainability-focused material selection project that drew on the Sustainable Development Goals and Engineering for One Planet frameworks.

The primary intervention at the focus of this study is a project that provides students an opportunity to work in groups of two to three as a team of chemical engineers tasked with evaluating possible polymer materials for products made via injection molding. As a part of their deliverables, the teams submit a one-page material selection recommendation summary to the instructor that will be given to a manufacturing team (mechanical engineers in a subsequent course). The recommendation must evaluate at least two potential materials and articulate the expected material performance and processing constraints. Additionally, the summary must include the embodied energy, CO2 footprint, and/or toxicity for each material. Our research questions were: RQ1) How do students in a polymer engineering class approach an assignment that explicitly requires considerations of sustainability? and RQ2) How do students perceive and report the effects of having to explicitly consider sustainability? We directly assessed student work on the material selection project using the rubric developed for the assignment. Additionally, we conducted a thematic analysis of student responses to both the portions of the assignment: (a) where they are explicitly tasked with considering sustainability and (b) where they are asked to reflect on their experience considering sustainability.

In this paper, we present summaries of students’ performance on the material selection project as well as the (un)common sentiments and experiences expressed in student reflections. We compare student response themes to a subset of Sustainable Development Goal indicators as well as Engineering for One Planet learning outcomes to demonstrate the effectiveness of the project. Finally, we end by describing how this study informed updates to the material selection project and by highlighting how the support and resources from the community of practice made this implementation possible. Overall, our paper illustrates how engineering educators can begin to tackle the complexity of sustainability integration into their traditional engineering courses one step, in our case one assignment, at a time.

Key words: course assessment, sustainability, baccalaureate institutions, reflection, qualitative