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Sustainability Science and Engineering: The Emergence of a New Metadiscipline
Abstract
A case is made for growth of a new metadiscipline of sustainability science and engineering. This new field integrates industrial, social, and environmental processes in a global context. The skills required for this higher level discipline represent a metadisciplinary endeavor, combining information and insights across multiple disciplines and perspectives with the common goal of achieving a desired balance among economic, environmental, and societal objectives. Skills and capabilities that are required to support the new metadiscipline are summarized. Examples of integrative projects are discussed in the areas of sustainability metrics and integration of industrial, societal, and environmental impacts. It is clear that a focus on green engineering that employs pollution prevention and industrial ecology alone are not sufficient to achieve sustainability, because even systems with efficient material and energy use can overwhelm the carrying capacity of a region or lead to other socially unacceptable outcomes. To meet the educational and human resource needs required for this new discipline, the technological and environmental awareness of society must be elevated and a sufficient and diverse pool of human talent must be attracted to this discipline.
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Citations
Cited by
Circular economy: The concept and its limitations
Korhonen, J., Honkasalo, A., & Seppälä, J. (2018) · Ecological Economics · doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.06.041 · Cited by 3,961
Circular economy as an essentially contested concept
Korhonen, J., Nuur, C., Feldmann, A., & Birkie, S. E. (2018) · Journal of Cleaner Production · doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.12.111 · Cited by 1,568
Sustainable valley entrepreneurial ecosystems
Cohen, B. (2006) · Business Strategy and the Environment · doi:10.1002/bse.428 · Cited by 796
Industry 4.0 and the Circular Economy: A Literature Review and Recommendations for Future Research
Awan, U., Sroufe, R., & Shahbaz, M. (2021) · Business Strategy and the Environment · doi:10.1002/bse.2731 · Cited by 609
Framing the Elusive Concept of Sustainability: A Sustainability Hierarchy
Marshall, J. D., & Toffel, M. W. (2005) · Environmental Science & Technology · doi:10.1021/es040394k · Cited by 297
Metadata
- Authors
- Mihelcic, J. R., Crittenden, J. C., Small, M. J., Shonnard, D. R., Hokanson, D. R., Zhang, Q., Chen, H., Sorby, S. A., James, V. U., Sutherland, J. W., & Schnoor, J. L.
- Venue
- Environmental Science & Technology
- Publisher
- American Chemical Society (ACS)
- Published
- 2003-11-04
- Volume
- 37
- Issue
- 23
- Pages
- 5314-5324
- ISSN
- 0013-936X (ISSN-L)
- 1520-5851
- OpenAlex
- W2047864204
- Cited by
- 473
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 44.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- The paper
- Mihelcic, J. R., Crittenden, J. C., Small, M. J., Shonnard, D. R., Hokanson, D. R., Zhang, Q., Chen, H., Sorby, S. A., James, V. U., Sutherland, J. W., & Schnoor, J. L. (2003). Sustainability Science and Engineering: The Emergence of a New Metadiscipline. Environmental Science & Technology. https://doi.org/10.1021/es034605h
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
