Modules to Introduce Sustainability and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to Undergraduate Students
Nathan Christensen
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Modules to Introduce Sustainability and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to Undergraduate Students | ||
| Published in: | Innovation in Engineering, Technology and Education for Competitiveness and Prosperity: Proceedings of the 12th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology | |
| Date of Conference: | July 21-24,2014 | |
| Location of Conference: | Guayaquil,Ecuador | |
| Authors: | Jorge Rodriguez Nathan Christensen | |
| Refereed Paper: | #275 | |
Abstract: | ||
| Sustainability has gained a lot of importance in the past couple of decades. Sustainable development has become an important aspect in any new product, process, or service, and it has an effect even for existing products, processes, and services. This trend is one of the main reasons why almost every engineering and sciences curricula being offered at colleges and universities across the globe has a sustainability component. In a technical program, in addition to the classical introductory material, it is important to expose the students to objective measurements of the environmental aspects of the proposed development. One such tool is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a technique that helps to introduce sustainability into the engineering design process. This paper presents classroom examples of LCA utilizing resources available in a CAD software, and online. This are introductory material that students use as basis for some exploration. | ||