Engineering for sustainability

"This book outlines a series of principles to help engineers design products and services to meet customer and societal needs with minimal impact on resources and the ecosystem. The third volume in a series on sustainable engineering, it provides up-to-date information on planning and implementing sustainable activities. Using examples and case studies from the government, military, academia, and commercial enterprises, the authors provide a set of tools for long-term sustainability and exlain how an entire enterprise can be engineered to sustain itself"--

"Preface Sustainability is an ability: the ability to endure. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological species survive. For the environment, it is assessing whether or not project outputs can be produced without permanent and unacceptable changes in the environment. For humans, it is our long-term physical and cultural well-being. For mechanical systems and structures, it is maximizing reliability while conserving required resources and reducing waste. For an entity or an enterprise, it is the ability of the enterprise, its products, and its systems to remain competitive and productive long term, without failure, while minimizing waste. Sustainability and sustainable development have become popular goals. They have also become wide-ranging terms that can be applied to any entity or enterprise on a local or a global scale for long time periods. Sustainability has many interpretations. Recently, the term has been used more in the context of "green," which refers to having no negative impact on the environment, community, society, or economy (Bromley 2008). However, the traditional meaning centers on the words "to endure" or "to maintain" or "to survive," which is the context for sustainability used in this book. Here, sustainability means to adopt a strategy or prescription to maintain the ability of an entity or enterprise and its systems or services to survive with established performance requirements in the most effective and efficient manner possible over the entity's life cycle. Engineering for Sustainability is the third volume in a series of manuscripts under the title Sustaining the Military Enterprise. The first volume, An Architecture for a Lean Transformation (Mathaisel 2007),"--