Educating the chemical engineer of the future

Edmond Byrne examines how sustainability needs to quickly become the context for 21st century chemical engineering education. Chemical engineers, with their inherent understanding of material and energy balances and the second law of thermodynamics, can appreciate how any economic societal construct that does not consider the earth as a whole and materially closed system is ultimately doomed to failure. Embedding a sustainability-informed paradigm cannot be achieved by merely adding a module as an add-on to an already crowded curriculum. Graduates with a sustainability-informed education would also better understand the need for multi and inter-disciplinary approaches to solving the ill-defined real problems they are likely to encounter through their professional careers, across areas such as those outlined in the Roadmap.