BEE 4830

Engineering Sustainability

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

Sustainability is a complex and multifaceted concept without straightforward solutions. This course is a multidisciplinary introduction to the evaluation of sustainability, sustainable development obstacles and opportunities, and explore engineering research needs. We will practice both qualitative and quantitative approaches with a heavy focus on writing about sustainability concepts and sustainability analysis in practice. The course spans modules that focus on understanding the root causes of unsustainability to sustainability assessment frameworks to design and innovation. The culmination of the course will be a final team project that will be developed by an industry, campus, or community partner to practice the quantitative approaches learned in the course and tie to the relevant qualitative concept discussed in class.

Prerequisites BEE 2220 and BEE 2510 or BEE 2600.

Distribution Requirements (DLG-AG, SCH-AG)

Exploratory Studies (CU-SBY)

Last 4 Terms Offered (None)

Learning Outcomes

• Identify, formulate, and solve quantitative sustainability assessments of products and processes for industry and research applications. |Understand the complex, interdisciplinary nature of sustainable engineering and be able to produce relevant information for identifying tradeoffs and making decisions.
• Critically think about practical ways that engineers can include social, ecological and technological systems into our problem solving and efforts towards sustainable design.
• Quantify various ecosystem services (ES) and apply ES frameworks within sustainability assessment and design.

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