5.4. Environmental Performance Indicators

Sustainable engineering design principles were discussed in Section 5.2, and these principles stand as guidelines for engineers to create more sustainable processes and products. But in order to fully use these principles in design, indicators of environmental performance are needed to quantify the impacts and compare impacts to conventional technologies, processes, and products. This approach to environmental management is based on the principle that “anything that can be measured can be improved.” The purpose of this section is to introduce environmental performance measures that have been used in engineering design and product development.

Chapter 2 introduced concepts of risk assessment and included applications to human health and to product life-cycle assessment. In both of these applications, a methodology was used that first defined a system to evaluate, estimated environmental releases, determined exposure to sensitive human and environmental receptors, and calculated damage to human health or impacts to the environment. We will further develop those approaches in this section.