PROMOTING SUSTAINABILITY AND ETHICS IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN CHEMICAL ENGINEERING COURSES

Nowadays, environmental concerns have led to an increase in sustainability and ethics thoughts the society. New and common products need to evolve to sustainability while properties, applications, and recyclability are maintained.

Chemical engineers are usually found in all the steps involving the life cycle of a product: from the production of raw materials to the manufacturing of the desired product, including the quality analysis, product life end and recyclability. Thus, it is necessary to promote sustainability and ethics in chemical engineer students as future engineers which could contribute to improving the production and life cycle use of these products.

In this sense, some of the optative subjects in the Chemical Engineering Degree at Girona’s University has introduced some activities to promote sustainability and ethics. One of the activities proposed is to develop a sustainable product. The students need to define the product, looking forward to and define the requirements of the market and its trends. Also, it is necessary to search for the common materials used and propose an alternative which needs to fulfil the abovementioned requirements. Students will design the product and simulate the mechanical performance of the product with its proposed alternative material. Moreover, a life cycle analysis will be performed to compare the sustainability of the material proposed.

The evaluation of this activity was performed in an oral presentation where students present from the market basics requirements to the life cycle results obtained. This subject was highly followed by all the students and their feedback was positive and considered adequate to include this activity inside these optative courses.