For the past few years, Charlie Paton has been busy designing and creating an award-winning system that uses seawater to provide an economic and sustainable means of cultivating high quality crops, year round, in hot, arid coastal regions. Like many engineering efforts to develop sustainable products for the future, it has enormous potential.

"In many parts of the world, over-pumping of ground water has led to lowering of the water table and salinisation, making traditional agriculture no long viable," he says. "The Seawater Greenhouse works by humidifying and de-humidifying the ventilation air using solar energy and seawater to provide fresh water and cooling. The greenhouses use very little electrical power and are made with low-cost materials, which are 100 per cent recyclable. The system therefore enables high value crops to be grown year round in some of the hottest countries of the world."

Sustainability is the latest buzzword in engineering circles, and it is very firmly on the agenda to stay, says Brian Robinson at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. "It`s a massively growing area. The challenges of climate change are huge for everyone," he says.

Those who have images of engineers as boffins working away on designs and solutions in isolation should think again, he says. "A lot of the challenges around carbon, energy and water efficiency are not simply about the creation of new products. They`re about getting the message across to key influencers, decision makers and purchasers about how important sustainability is."

Simon Pringle, director at the environmental consultancy WSP Environmental, adds that engineers working on sustainability can therefore expect to work in multi-disciplinary teams, "which makes for much more interesting work." He explains: "sustainability is a hybridised area of activity, rather than being about pure engineering, so today`s engineers can find themselves working with professionals such as acousticians, policy makers, experts in vibration and light, architects and planners. In fact, this kind of diversity is key to delivering a good project."

Engineers who work at WSP Environmental, which employs 900 people across 60 offices, says projects for their engineers range from working with major corporate and government clients interested in "greening" their buildings, right through to helping to build sustainable cities in countries such as China. "Here, they have to ensure that waste is recycled as resources and that water usage is cascaded from one building to another very smoothly and that the whole city is carbon efficient - just to name a few examples."

The surge of interest in environmental issues in the engineering world is particularly strong when it comes to buildings. Little wonder when you consider that a staggering 40 per cent of the UK`s carbon emissions come from buildings alone - with a similar picture in many other countries. But it`s not just altruistic visions of saving the planet that is driving the attempts to do something about it, says EMCOR Energy`s managing director, Keith Pedder. "The cost of energy has seen a 100 per cent increase over the last three years. Then there are all the regulations that have recently come in, and there is also a growing element of what`s known as corporate social responsibility, whereby companies are trying to be seen to be green because it`s good for their reputation."

In some locations, such as London, there are additional green targets, he adds. "Ken Livingstone has put in place a 10 per cent renewable strategy, which means that you now have to produce buildings that have a 10 per cent renewable energy component. And while it`s London specific, a lot of other local governments are picking up on what they deem to be workable targets. Next year, this figure will rise to 20 per cent, so it`s an aggressive rise, leaving engineers and others no choice but to rise to the challenge."

It`s not just new builds that are affected by environmental concerns. The Cowyards development in the Blenheim Estate, Oxfordshire, has been sympathetically restored with sustainability at the top of the agenda. "Existing building materials have been reclaimed and re-used, new timber has been sourced in a responsible manner and optimum environmental performance has been engineered by incorporating natural ventilation and an under-floor heating system that utilises the mass of the solid-stone walls," explains Richard Thorpe, building surveyor at Ridge, who led the project.

A range of engineers were involved, he says. "We had structural engineers, mechanical engineers and electrical engineers, among others and they were all fairly young with an average age in their late twenties. Engineers tend to love nothing more than a challenge, so you can imagine how they embraced the idea of getting sustainable services to fit with a building of this age, and keeping costs low."

Belinda Morgan, partner at RW Gregory, agrees that the days when engineers had to wait until later in life before getting exciting projects are long gone. She adds, "The massive push on efficiency means that environmental issues aren`t an optional bolt-on anymore. They`re something that every kind of engineer is expected to work with."

That said, some of her company`s projects are more focused on sustainability than others. "You get sectors such as healthcare, which have energy targets that they have to meet. But then you get some clients that, almost entirely out of choice, want to be completely carbon neutral."

In such cases, the engineers work on things like reducing the amount of fossil fuels and increasing the use of solar power and wind power, she says. "In one recent project, we also worked a lot with the ground. Basically, if you bore down into the ground 18 to 20 metres, it holds the temperature at around 11 or 12 degrees. You can use this as a source for cooling in the summer by feeding it through pipes into the building interior. Then, in the winter, that 12 degrees is a lot warmer than the three degrees outside, so it can be used to help heat the building."

Morgan believes there`s never been a more exciting time to go into engineering. "It`s not just the environmental challenges, but the new technologies that are coming in to meet these challenges," she says.

Stuart Bage, HR manager for GE Water UK, agrees. "Just a few weeks into their role, graduates can be running £1m-worth of equipment, which has an attraction in itself. When you add to that the opportunities to travel and make a genuine difference to societies, the appeal becomes even clearer."

So keen are some major corporate companies to go green that they are employing engineers to come up with solutions in-house. Edore Crowley works in a team of three chemical engineers for pharmaceutical company Pfizer, where she has been involved in the new process to manufacture Pregabalin, that saved tonnes of reagent and waste, and also won the Astra Zeneka Award for Excellence in Green Chemistry and Engineering at the IChemE Awards. "It`s still unusual for people like me to have this type of position in a pharmaceutical company, so I feel very lucky. I really enjoy the technical challenges and the fact that my job is different day after day. Definitely the biggest reward has been coming up with a solution which means that the 50 per cent of the chemistry that was waste is now completely reusable," she says.

Young people considering a career in engineering who have good intentions, but know little about the fine detail of sustainability, can rest assured that it is increasingly being introduced to the curriculum of engineering degrees, says Professor Richard Dodds, fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. "It has become more and more clear that employers need graduates who understand the issues, so we`ve got some visiting professors to develop some course materials and teaching, as well as to encourage department heads to incorporate sustainable development into the curriculum," he says. In fact, since 1998, the Academy has introduced professors with industrial sustainability experience across a network of 26 universities, a figure that continues to grow.

`I love being faced with a challenge and coming out with a solution`
Mark Turner, 27, is a mechanical engineer at the building service consultancy, R W Gregory
I`ve always liked the idea of clean living, where you are self-sufficient rather than taking away from the environment. One project I recently worked on involved a number of buildings that formed a training centre and we looked at putting in passive ventilation, solar hot water and rainwater harvesting. We also looked at thermal mass - basically, the heat from things like computers can be drawn into the structure of the building, which reduces the dependency on cooling the atmosphere. I work on about four projects at one time and I love the fact that I`m able to take an innovative approach. That`s what attracted me to engineering. I loved being faced with a challenge, applying my knowledge and coming out with a solution. And as the area of sustainability is changing all the time, you really work at the cutting edge.

`I was particularly interested in the ways waste could be reduced`
Birgit Balkenhoff, 36, is an environmental engineer for water and environmental engineering company, Earth Tech.
When I was 18, I became quite active about saving the environment. I was particularly interested in the ways that waste could be reduced. Having done a degree and a masters in environmental engineering, I worked for a year in Germany and then came to Earth Tech, a leading company in waste water treatment. I came in on the graduate scheme, which lasted four years, and I worked in various departments. My first role was on the waste water networks, the second with the environment team, and for the third, I moved into the process department. Finally, I moved onto the Western Isle project, which is about the design and build of the UK`s first waste treatment plant using dry anaerobic digestion and composting. I enjoy the fact that these projects are at the forefront of technology and that I get to find solutions that please the client and help the environment.
(The Independent, 02/10/2006)
http://education.independent.co.uk/careers_advice/engineering/article1946245.ece