Implementation of industry sustainability metrics across multiple undergraduate design projects

This paper reports on student learning outcomes from an innovative approach to teaching sustainability. Employers continue to find gaps in attributes of their engineering graduates concerning sustainability. Teaching sustainability is problematic, with highly variable outcomes, but there is a consensus that problem based learning is a suitable pedagogical approach. A sophisticated industry decision-making tool was introduced to assist students to make better design decisions in a more systematic and rigorous way incorporating sustainability metrics. The tool has been introduced in problem based learning design courses spanning three years of a chemical engineering undergraduate degree program