Sustainable engineering should be based on principles that support sustainable development, as defined in the upper sections of this lesson. Engineering forms an interface between the design (i.e., the idea how to provide a sustainable solution to a technical problem) and implementation and production. In case of technology development, engineering phase is linked to almost every level of technology readiness spectrum. Sustainable engineering principles should be contemplated and applied early to ensure that technology development and scale-up follow the environmentally benign route. It will be hard to turn back to redo and redesign things from later stages! In that sense, the sustainable engineering principles should be taken into account in decision making for both research and industrial projects as well as in policy making and decisions regarding funding of technological research.<br />There have been multiple attempts by academic and industrial institutions to formulate sustainable engineering principles. All of them fall within the triangle with Environmental, Social, and Economic values as cornerstones. The overarching goal is to generate a balanced solution to any engineering problem. If an engineering project benefits one of these three aspects but ignores the others, we have a lopsided system which creates tension, instability, and new problems in the long run.<br /><br /><br />By: MSc Fatima Safaa Fahim