Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University held a Green Engineering Round Table March 16 at the university's Northern Virginia Graduate Center. The event was cosponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science and Technology Council.

The Round Table was one in a series of workshops conducted under the Technology for a Sustainable Future initiative and focused on ways to foster environmentally conscious engineers during their post-secondary education and throughout their careers. Discussion by educators, industrial leaders, and federal agency representatives addressed how the green engineering concept could be furthered both in policy and practice.

Green engineering is a collection of attitudes, values, and principles aimed at reducing the adverse environmental impact of engineering practices. The goal is to reduce the necessity for "end-of-pipe" treatment by incorporating, at all stages of engineering, measures that eliminate waste and promote recycling and reuse. Green engineering principles permit engineers to include environmental consequences into decision processes in the same way economic or safety factors are considered.

The importance of adopting green engineering is now generally well accepted. The pace at which this takes place depends on the rate of advancement of various engineering technologies, changes in regulatory and tax policies, integration of environmental concerns into the primary activities of organizations, supportive organizational cultures, and work forces both educated and trained in green engineering. Satisfaction of these requires a joint effort by the government, private sector, and university communities.

Thomas Houlihan, an American Society of Mechanical Engineering Fellow on the White House National Science and Technology Council, discussed the background for the Technology for a Sustainable Future initiative and the schedule for the development of the National Environmental Technology Strategy. The current federal funding for technology development is more than $4 billion with about $2.7 billion for research and development (mostly monitoring technologies). Future budgets will emphasize pollution avoidance rather than remediation technologies. Houlihan noted that the workshop was important to pollution avoidance because green engineering focuses on the front end of the development cycle.

Houlihan discussed the funding gap that occurs between product proof-of-concept and commercialization. The so-called "valley of death" needs to be bridged by government and industry with partnerships. Industry is willing, but it is government that needs to "get its act together," Houlihan said.

When asked how the government will help bridge the valley of death, Houlihan said that national laboratory and private industry-developed technologies need to be pulled into the marketplace. The Department of Commerce can help with development of the international market for new technologies, and government can provide testing and demonstration sites, especially in the area of remediation. Government can also create markets for environmental products with its strong purchasing power. With regard to the state permitting process, there needs to be a way to implement reciprocity among the states after a single demonstration is completed. As a result of these concerns, the government has created the Interagency Environmental Technologies Office to help coordinate activities within the federal government and between the federal government, the states, and the private sector.

The following issues were discussed and actions suggested at the workshop.

• If all engineering disciplines become environmentally conscious, there will be no need for a separate environmental engineering discipline. Engineering curricula should include courses on communication and ethics. All undergraduates should be involved in environmental issues, not just engineers.

• A cross-media/multimedia systems analysis approach is required to solve environmental problems through pollution avoidance and prevention strategies, rather than end-of-the-pipe control systems. Regulatory processes need to accept and encourage avoidance and prevention strategies.

• Designers need to understand how their designs legally and politically impact the environment and address environmental issues at the earliest stages of design.

• To help small businesses cope with myriad regulations, continuing education/professional students could take on projects to solve small-business problems.

• Government research and development tax credits should be given for environmental technologies or for worker training in environmental pollution control.

• The federal government should set up Environmental Zones, somewhat analogous to Economic Demonstration Sites, in which social/environmental/economic goals are met simultaneously.

Virginia Tech has a funded mandate to introduce environmental laws and issues into the curricula of all departments. Specialized courses in environmentally conscious manufacturing, electrical energy demand and the global environment, and water supply and sanitation in developing countries have been developed. There are university teams working on more efficient, clean-burning coal processes, environmentally benign manufacturing materials, and noise reduction technologies—development that could provide jobs for Virginians.

Access information on the Green Engineering Round Table '95 through the World Wide Web. Start with the Virginia Tech home page (http://www.vt.edu) and select University Initiatives. Then select Green Engineering Initiative, then College of Engineering Round Table '95.