The Status of Sustainable Engineering

William A. Wallace

TRANSCRIPT OF TALK (submitted text)

The thesis of my talk today is that this is a crucial time for the engineering profession.  We’re either going to be part of the problem or part of the solution.  We need a framework for discussion and define sustainability, not in the policy terms that you’ve heard today, but something in engineering terms, which I’ll get into in a moment, and develop and communicate a sound business case for sustainable development.  Many people have thought of this as one of those wonderful ideas in search of application.  I can tell you today, and we’ll talk about later, that this is something that businesses are following today.  Your clients are following it today, and it’s a very important notion for the future.  And finally as I said before, I think consulting engineers right now are behind the curve; that doesn’t mean we can’t catch up, but we’ve got a long way to go, and there’s some serious competition ahead of us.

The summary of my talk today quickly is that we wanted to have a framework for discussion.  I think we again have to define sustainability in terms we can understand.  We have to, and we’ll look at, sustainable engineering markets and services; where do our clients want to go, what are clients doing today, which is important for all of you, and let me tell you there are good margins out there which would be very important for all of us.  And finally, what’s the status of sustainable engineering?  What’s the response of clients, and what have consulting engineers done today and some future projections of the future?

Well, let’s start with the definition of what sustainable development is and go back to some of the saline(?) events that have occurred over the past 20/30 years.  We look at this timeline and think about the time the Silent Spring was published with Rachel Carson talking about the dangers of synthetic chemicals.  We follow that with the Santa Barbara oil spill, where all of a sudden people realize that all this oil and energy they were creating had its other problems and fouling the beaches of Santa Barbara.  We have the Club of Rome Report which everybody poo-pooed as a dumb idea; how could we talk about any limits to growth; we’re just so wonderful, smart people.

And then a few days later, we have the OPEC oil shock saying that all of a sudden, there’s oil that we all thought was plentiful, all of a sudden wasn’t available -- not because of natural things, but what people were doing out in the world to protect their resources.

We then had Servasio, the problem with Dioxin in Italy. We had O-Zone depletion discoveries of  CSC’s and though as you notice in the paper this morning, there was more discussion of the larger ozone hole, popularly generated by CFC. emissions.

Love Canal – Big thing in my career, discovery of that hazardous waste we thought we were going to control; we’re not only out of control, but harming the environment and threatening public health.

Three-Mile Island – Not just toxic chemicals, but radioactive materials; we’re being threatened.

Then we had Bopal - a  thing that changed forever the way the chemical industry operates. 

Chernobyl – another nuclear problem of big time; and the importance of Chernobyl was that it not only was a problem for Russia, but it washed over into Scandinavia, and they had to destroy a number of cattle and food materials that had been contaminated.

Exxon Valdez – a question of how we transport all these materials.

Prince Spa controversial(??) going into a ------ this is shelved oil thinking that it could operate without considering what the public thought about its operations.

The Belgian food product scare  -- PCB’s getting into feed that through a series of cycles, all of a sudden contaminated a lot of the food products spread throughout Europe.

Now there is some positive sides of this as we were seeing these events, we looked at the Stockholm Conference of  first global response thinking about the pesticides that Rachel Carson pointed out.

We then had the Bruntland Commission Report, the first notion that sustainable development was a way to think about the way we ought to operate in the future.

CMA – Chemical Manufacture & Association’s response to Bopal saying there’s a new operating set of principles; and you as chemical companies, if you are going to operate in this world, you are going to have to think about that’s the way you are going to have to operate, and a set of principles that talk about how they care for the products and services they deliver.

Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro – led by Marie Strong, you hear from later, of not only a first event that talked about how world leaders think about sustainability, but there’s a thing called Rio plus 10, which is coming up in a little while which is got industry very concerned that they need to say to the world that in ten years since Rio, we did a number of things, and there’s a real strong movement by industry trying to look at its record and say we’ve done something useful and important.  And I failed to mention but while the Earth Charter launch, which I think is a very significant item, that Jim and others have worked on to again set these principles down.

Industries are on the firing line.  This is a graphic showing back in the 60’s, we concerned ourselves with pesticides and mining and phosphates from detergents.  We then worried about things in the 80’s; deep sea fishing, fertilizers, forestry and then all the way up.  This concern by industry was perhaps best expressed by a fellow named Bill McDonald, you’ll hear me quote regularly.  He wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly many years ago saying that if you look at the way industry, and I include governments, too, on this, have taken the issue of how they work in the world today, you might call us a retroactive design assignment which says that we designed a production system that:

• puts billions of pounds of toxic material in the air and soil every year,

• measures prosperity by activity not legacy,

• requires thousands of complex regulations to keep people and natural systems from being poisoned,

• produces material so dangerous that they require vigilance for future generations,

• results in gigantic amounts of waste,

• puts valuable materials in places all over the planet where they are hard to retrieve,

• and then erodes the diversity of biological species and cultural practices.

 This, if you think about it, is what the kinds of things we were doing expressed by somebody who really has cared about the way we are going.

You put all work in perspective and if you’ll look on the vertical access our industrial system, these are the kinds of engineering design assignments that we have which fit into that mold.  We try to devise a way to produce more product for less cost.  We bury our waste in supposedly leak-proof structures, which none of us believe are leak proof, but we make believe they are.  We try to keep product codes in check, just enough toxic materials, etc., etc.  While these are things we know we do, and this is what our clients want us to do, I suggest to you there is a better way to get out of this commodity work that many of us are doing as we speak.

Now what is sustainable development?  The Bruntland Commission defined this very well as first recognizing the link between environmental and economic development. 

They said development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.  In other words, we don’t want to destroy the environment by ourselves and leave nothing for our children.  What this was also recognizing, though, was not only this link but the fact that poverty is a major source of non-sustainable behavior.  To the extent, we have poor people; they need to survive, and they are going to use the resources that they have available, and perhaps non-sustainable ways.  They also recognize that the scale of our interventions is changing.  It’s not something that you might do in your backyard that only affects your property, in the case of Chernobyl, and other issues.  These things are spreading across regions, across country boundaries, which makes a quite significant difference.

Other ways of thinking about this is the caring capacity, which I’ll talk about.  We need to worry about what the limit of the planet is; how much they can absorb in terms of people on the planet doing things in a normal way or the way they’ve always done them.

In a positive side, for the first time, we’re talking about something where we try to integrate economics and environment, and we’ll go into it a little bit later about social, and represents a positive concept for the first time.  This is not industry fighting environmentalists; these are both recognizing that each one of them is using the same set of resources, worrying about them, and so it became a way to think about sustainability and get into a positive dialogue and a common ground for discussion.

If you’ll look at the way this has come together, we started out with economic concerns; we brought in environmental, we want to bring in social, and eventually end up with a kind of balance in the three for sustainability.  Of those you go back in history, I remember when I first got into engineering, the only thing we worried about, frankly, was economic, and I draw that economic broadly to include technological.  We would do a project if we had the money to do it, and it made technological sense.  And then the environmentalists came in, and so there was a shift of the pendulum the other way saying that no, no, you have to worry about the environment, and that we battled that back and forth.  And then people said well, okay, you guys have got the environmental and the economics right, but I want jobs.  I want to have a quality of life in my community, and so I want to bring in social issues here.  And that is sustainability, ladies and gentlemen, in this period we’re in now.  That’s what people are thinking about, and there are forces at play that make us think about them very seriously.

The definition for engineering is still a little vague.  It’s hard to quantify; how do you rule from concept to application?  There’s confusion on both sides of the issue.  In some places, this is a code word for no growth.  I know in my own country, we have our people saying to us, you better be careful when you use that sustainability up on Capitol Hill.  It tends to raise the hackles of a number of congressmen and senators where that’s the opposite reaction in Europe.  People are still not understanding what this means.  It’s an excuse for business as usual.  I’m being sustainable.

It’s not defined, so you can say that all you want, it only louses up credibility.  It’s also an opportunity for green-washing, saying that you’re doing some things; you’re adding some natural features, more windows; they open in your facility, big deal; that does not mean sustainability.  And so it calls for a more quantifiable model.  What I tried to do is, those of you who called, a meeting, I guess it was about 10 years ago, Don Roberts from FIDIC presented a kind of a model that dealt with the industrial system, and we had some talks and I think I modified that to some extent.  But, let’s look at a sustainability model, and what we’ve got to deal with.  We’ve got, first the nonrenewable resources.  I’ve drawn kind of a tank there with a gauge to represent the nonrenewable set, and along comes the ecological resources.  There you have a balance or a set of renewable resources and nonrenewable that you’re drawing from. We, as an industrialized society, started using those resources by extraction and harvesting, and we could draw those arrows in, too, so they are part of our industrial system.  We have some of those resources, however, that for technical reasons, they are just not economically retrievable, so some of them are not simply available at this point, so we’re up to a little less than we thought we had.  And by the way, when we were extracting these wastes, we have waste materials that end up in the ecological side of the house. 

Okay, so let’s finish our processes, now, and we have waste coming from each one of those steps, many of which get discarded back in the renewable system. We have some resource recovery, not a lot. Could do better. But that’s also part of the system as well.  And part of that waste disposal, we damage ecological resources, and some of that starting to approach on the caring capacity.  All of this is done in a built environment which we helped to build, and all of this happens within a social structure that we have a stake in and that people look at what we do and judge us for what we do. 

But now comes the debate.  You saw that model, but first of all we have to recognize is the difference between local regional and global and problems emerge at different scales, and so people start to talk about sustainability.  It may be global warming; it may be ozone layer; it also may be, do I want that new facility in my backyard messing up my quality of life in my community?  And as problems emerge on different scales, we’ve had many reports of non-sustainable behaviour, but they’ve all been anecdotal.  Gee, there’s a problem there in the forest; well we’ve got plenty of forest over there.  Technology is helping us out, though, helping us realize that to make more sense out of it.

There’s also an issue of systems interaction.  And that is, the efforts that we may try in one area to improve things, may not be correct in another; such as, I use the example of the electric car.  There may be somebody out there who wants to challenge this judgment, but we’re starting to put electric vehicles on the road, but they require charging, and that requires electric generation, and coal burning, or however you do it, so what that tradeoff is may be still debatable, but you have to consider this whole area in a systems view.  And simply it is also a lack of information. 

What is the ecological caring capacity of this planet?  We don’t know.  We do know that if we proceed at the same rate of development to have everyone achieve the same level of standard of living as the OECD countries, then we’ll need another planet to live on because we don’t have enough, so there is a question of caring capacity.  And there is also a question of  how much resources remain and how much we can economically extract from them.  And so I tried to define the debate of sustainability, and all the noise you hear in the press and in discussions amongst various opinion holders, that it breaks down into two parts. We have the resource constrained bunch and the resource abundance bunch. Each of them has a different opinion on what the levels of availability for the ecological resources or the non-renewables.  For the resource constraint group, they’re saying that we have impending resource shortages.  We have substantial ecological damage, and we’re reaching the caring capacity.  If you’ll look at their non-renewables, impending resources are there.  Our shortages are there, and technology is not capable of making those resources economically available.

Then you have the other group; different perspective on all of that.  No real resource shortages.  The cup is not only half full; it’s about 7/8.  Not a lot of ecological damage.  If we could, we’d repair it; not reach the caring capacity, not even close.  No real resource shortages in the nonrenewable side, and technology will continue to save the day. 

So, which do you believe?  We don’t have a lot of data; we’re getting better data because we have a good IT systems and global surveillance, and we’re getting a sense that these are problems, but nobody really has an arguable answer at this point.  So, what you get is confusion.  Who’s right?  Well, I have a sense from my judgment that perhaps it’s the fellows that think about resource shortages.  As you look at some of the data that’s out there, 11 of the 15 most important fishing areas of the world are fully overexploited; increasing severity of red tides, these are things caused by pollution runoff. These non-point sources of agriculture, pesticides, fertilizers, that are washing and creating more red tides which are very dangerous and economically damaging. 

Global climate change – there’s a big debate about this.  What we know right now is there’s a 95% certainty that the earth is warming caused by anthroprogenic or people or activity.  The problem is we don’t know what the impacts are, and we don’t even know the sign of the impacts yet, but this is something to worry about, and not fool with, because we only have one planet. 

And finally, as I mentioned before, the ozone layer.  So these are things that are happening today, and you could look at these as well, we can fix this technologically, no problem-o, we’ve done this before.  However, when you think about what’s happening in developing countries, the world 2 and world 3 nations, you realize that they’re poised for  tremendous growth in the next 20 years, and guess what?  If they don’t change the technology quickly, they’re going to use the same conventional technologies that got it to this point in the first place.  So, we have some kind of concern.

Little bit about caring capacity.  Can I try to draw that jagged line to indicate that we have a varying margin for action depending on what metrics you want to place, and this is hypothetical; I just tried to graph something for explanation.  But, how close we are to these suggests, again, you could look at this globally, regionally, even locally, that our margin for action in many fronts is starting to decrease.  And so we are faced with that problem.

But, I want to change the debate.  I mean, why argue who’s right when what we’re doing is pretty stupid.  When you think about the problems we have and the technology we could apply, why continue to extract more and more and more.  Why don’t we figure out different ways to use the technology to recycle more, do other things?  And here are some of the problems we have.  Here’s a case in the Philippines that we looked at for a project, and right now, there are regions in the Philippines where people build very inadequate housing, because that’s all the technology they have.  They go out in the forest and cut down hardwood trees.  Rain comes, washes away the housing, and they go back and cut down more hardwood trees, where there is a technology available using local materials that they could build houses out of more secure, concrete cement block kinds of structures.  This is a simple technology that can be transferred.

Impending water shortages – I attended the World Water Forum in Den Hague last March, and was astounding the facts there.  Right now, one out of five people do not have safe, affordable drinking water.  They rely on bottled water which could cost as high as $16.50 a gallon, where you and I probably pay something on the order of  40 to 80 cents.  This is all they have to try to get that it.  And worse, 3.3 billion right now do not have access to safe sanitation, and that’s increasing as well as children, 3 or 4 million a year dying of water born diseases.   So, we have some serious, serious problems to deal with which, as engineers, as people of the world, we should not ignore.

Little different change of pace – transportation solutions.  We have our own people, again, out there fighting issues of smart growth, thinking that, heck, I want to do more highway jobs, and get low margin for it because that’s what I’ve done all my life is build highways, instead of realizing that what people are asking for is holistic transportation solutions with multi-media transportation and a lot of new opportunities to do things at higher margin.  Again, I told you I would quote McDonald(?).  He mentioned a very interesting thing; he said we live in a world, least in the U.S. we do, where the spouses have to get a second job in order to buy the second car to pay for it, and in order to have this so they can drive their kids to activities that you and I used to walk to when we were children.  Urban sprawl is becoming something of a mystery to me why people still continue to go out and out and out. 

Finally, we have a very interesting development, which again gets a little closer to home and the work we do.  Industrial symbiosis(?) is a new way of thinking about how you interact with clients. 

Now, I use this example of the Columberg(?) district in Norway where a number of groups of companies got together and said, you know, I’ve got all this waste heat, and you pharmaceutical plant need heat.  Why don’t I just ship that to you?  And without going into all the details, here’s an example of industrial symbiosis where all of the waste materials of one plant became the feed stocks of another, and isn’t that a smart thing to do instead of throwing them away and paying money for it?  In fact, we are doing some projects right now in the States and around the world with a company that is thinking about that and bringing people together, industries together, and trying to work this out.  Now you say, well of course, this is obvious.  If this was available, people would have picked it up.  There was a story I heard earlier this week about if there’s a hundred dollar bill lying on the floor, somebody would have picked it up already.  But, in the process of looking at things like that, we discovered that one company said, “I’m an aircraft company.  I fly airplanes, and we fly on them, and I’ve got some OPEC gasoline.”  Now, I could make it right, but my attorneys tell me if I ever had a crash, this company would go under for all the lawsuits because I use this gasoline that had a bad name to it.  And he was sitting in a room with a cement plan operator, and said I’ll take everything you have.  But he was going to take that gasoline and dispose of it as a hazardous waste and pay so much money a ton to get it incinerated.  So, there is stuff like that going on that’s right under our noses.

Well, let me move on.  I noted earlier, and will talk about engineering markets and services for sustainable development.   And let’s look at some of the clients that are out there.  In the private sector, we have certainly industry.  We also have real estate developers which we’ll talk about the premium they’re looking for and how sustainability fits into their equations.  We also have the public sectors; cities, towns, municipalities, regional authorities, governments, all looking for sustainable activities from us as engineers, or from somebody. 

Let me start with the private sector.  I noted before, and Jim mentioned it, my connection with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. I’m privileged to attend their meetings as a liaison delegate.  Let me tell you that these are companies, at the time I had the slide made, what this group represented was 130 companies of large size, pretty much.  And if you look at their size, of course, these companies are all committed to sustainable activities; they’ve made a public commitment to do so.  If you add up the revenues, the annual revenues of these companies, they would be the third largest economy in the world, eclipsing Germany as number 3.  And then they added 20 more members since the time I did the slide. 

I mentioned the public commitment made by these companies, you can see it in their ads and the way they are treating, not only the way they operate as firms in environmentally sound ways, but also social concerns.  There are a number of sustainability rating firms who are like Dow who are rating how companies perform and according to a   sustainability index. 

And there are a number of investment funds all focused on how companies perform sustainably.  Now you may think this is the sort of thing that people do for again for the green eyewash we talked about before, but I again just attended a meeting of the World Business Council, and Michael Porter spoke there.  And he and his colleague at Harvard, Jeffrey Sachs(?), who’s another famous economist, have done something they call the Global Competitiveness Report, and they are correlating global competitiveness of nations and regions and success of those areas to what their environmental performance is, and they get a 90% correlation meaning that it’s worth money to countries to do better environmentally, than it is to try to act like a place, well you can come over here and act like you want to because we don’t care about the environment.  And they have a pretty good case of that.  That book, by the way, Global Competitiveness Report, is going to be published by the Oxford Press, and should be out shortly.

Now what’s industry’s response?  If we look at, on the vertical access, impacts versus scope where there is local and multi-national, you find kind of a mixture here, and I’m again trying to figure out where these companies and where our clients might lie on that map.  If you look at kind of a local area, it’s been noted that these are places where some of the worst environmental performance occurs.  I’m not making this up; this is actual data there.  And some of the best success is over in the other quadrant  in the multi-nationals.  And that’s not my words, those are Michael Porter’s words. 

If you go back now and take that graph, and look at some of the occupants in there, you find this.  Companies, like the chemical industry that’s had a wakeup call at Bopal, as far as products who find it more and more increasingly difficult to operate, others mining, cement, utilities, all of these company groups out there, these sectors have now realized that sustainable development kinds of behavior is the only way they are going to succeed.  And I mentioned to a number of people who had asked me, these people now are spending 22 million dollars with the World Business Council just to study how they can become sustainable.   Now within that group, we have some interesting companies.  I call Interface and Stoneyfield(?) Farms, these are the evangelists.  Interface, you may know Ray Anderson, he had an epiphany of several years ago, recognizing that he’s a carpet company president, and the more carpet he produces that goes into landfills, the worst the environment gets.  And so he’s reengineering his entire corporate structure and his facilities to give them a zero environmental footprint. 

Down on this other part of the scale is Stoneyfield Farms. Stoneyfield makes yogurt up  in the Northeast, got them in an innocuous kind of dessert-like thing that many of us have.  They also want to do an environmental footprint to make it at zero, and they’re marketing that as the differentiator in a field of yogurt manufacturers, they got very little to differentiate with, and so some of these are doing it for market reasons. 

Then, there is a repentance.  I bring in Shell Oil and Nike.  Nike got in big trouble, as you may recall, for their practices with child labor. 

Shell Oil had an incident in Brent Spar they call it.  This was an oil platform that they were going to dump in the North Sea, only to find out that the environmental groups said, “Oh no, you’re not,” and protested it so loudly that it affected them at the gas pump.  And so what you’re finding today and what’s driving a lot of this is that nongovernmental organizations, NGO’s, are affecting behavior on how it’s going to operate. 

Let’s look at the public sector.  People are experiencing the consequences of non-sustainable development, and they’re seeking a better quality of life.  In their interests, again I mention Bill McDonald’s comment about urban sprawl.  If you go to some of the other countries, we visited Taipei a couple of years ago now, and while we’re sitting in a traffic jam in a taxi, they’re people wearing gas masks on little motor scooters running in and out, just to try and beat, get home in time; things have gotten so bad.  And so this is something that people are finding important.  What they’re doing, we’re finding that cities recognizing this are competing for jobs based on quality of life.  I talked to a woman a couple of years ago in Racine, Wisconsin; she was the City Manager of Racine.  Racine, if you don’t know it, is a very small town up in the northern part of the United States, and she had an organization called Sustainable Racine.  Now, what she was doing one day was meeting with German officials from a company of where do we locate, and the fact that Racine, Wisconsin, had the kind of ambiance that this company wanted to bring employees to, was, in fact, just the thing that they wanted.  She, in fact, told me that they walked around Racine and walked up a hill.  Atop of the hill, they were overlooking a lake, and all of a sudden, a flock of geese flew in, and the guy turned to her and said, “This is where we are going to locate.”  I kidded her, in fact, saying that you probably had a bunch of geese stacked over there, and somebody yelled queue the geese, and the geese flew in, but she assured me that that wasn’t the case.  But that’s the kind of thing people think are important. 

We need livable communities, and there are a number of sustainability initiatives going on, not only in cities but regions and in small island nations.  We have work going on in Fiji right now; an island like Fiji or like Hawaii are going to be the first ones who are going to be affected by non-sustainable behavior, for overcrowding, for global warming, and so they’re probably on the first part of our client list looking for help there.

There’s also a big effort in green buildings, and I’ll get into that in a moment.  There’s also new forms of procurement and construction.  We learned that the US Navy no longer builds its facilities on a first cost basis.  They do it on life-cycle costs, meaning how much can you save me over time; not how much is the building going to cost that I walk into it.  You’ll notice that the incentive now is to save on a life-cycle cost, not save on first cost and throw the utilities payments and everything else back on the Navy. 

I mention sustainability in sustainable cities.  With about an hour’s work on the Internet, I collected this many cities who are all declaring that they are sustainable in some fashion. 

They may not have achieved it yet, and it may be a little bit of green wash, but they’re up there saying that, and I’m sure if you’re out there selling services to them, the notion that you can provide those sorts of services will be quite interesting to them.  And again, it’s just a snapshot; I’m sure there are more out there.

There are also some communities that we’re working with.  Arrowhead Springs, California, the developer we’re working with there suggested that he wants to build a sustainable community.  Why?  He’s not out to save the planet; he’s out to make money, and finds that there’s a premium to sell there. 

Italy is another interesting visit we had.  Here’s a place in Italy that’s got culture they want to preserve as well as the economy, and they want to bring people into the Internet age and want to again preserve their culture.  Senator Marie Strong, I’m sure, will speak about that at lunch time.

In conclusion, I want to get into engineering services and where we stand.  I mention the environmental footprint.  Sustainable engineering services are helping clients reduce that footprint in ways that are environmentally sound and fair and equitable.  And here’s some of the services; again, it’s all of the same thing with the possible exception of recovery and restoration.  Things that you’re doing in one fashion or other all the time. The problem is that few consulting engineers have sustainable development projects, and I question this in talking with some of the clients and some of the companies that are at the World Business Council, and learned they either are unaware of the market or their selling strategies are quite out of whack.  And what somebody told me was that people who don’t understand sustainability come into a company like Interface and others and they, just as this fellow put it, turning up the volume.  They say well, we were doing solid waste engineering, and we’re going to do it better.  And he gets kind of a chuckle and gets shown the door. 

Another problem is insufficient knowledge or capabilities. What you’re going to need to do here is not look at these things in piece meal, but look at problems of sustainability as a holistic problem.  It’s not just putting in pieces of equipment; it’s doing it in a way that wraps it all together, and that one isn’t traded off against another.  Also considering the social aspects of it; bringing in stakeholders.  Having them understand what you’re doing so that you can break down any resistance that may be out there and may be formidable.