Industrial Engineering Needs a Sustainable Orientation

Proceedings of the 7th Asia Pacific Industrial Engineering and Management Systems Conference 2006 17-20 December 2006, Bangkok, Thailand

Industrial Engineering Needs a Sustainable Orientation Patrick Moriarty† and Damian Kennedy Monash University, Melbourne, 3800, AUSTRALIA +61-3-9903-2584, Email: {patrick.moriarty, damian.kennedy}@eng.monash.edu.au

Abstract. Predicting the future will always be difficult, but the world will probably soon face a number of major environment/resource challenges, including global climate change and oil depletion. Accommodating the consumption aspirations of industrialising countries, particularly fast-growing Asian economies such as China and India, in a world of finite resources and pollution absorbtion capacity, will increase our difficulties. If serious, these challenges promise a sharp break with trends of the past half-century for both production and consumption. The first main section of this paper uses a critical analysis of the recent literature in a range of areas to examine the global challenges of oil depletion and climate change. The second section analyses the available ‘tech fix’ solutions. The third and last main section discusses how both Industrial Engineering practice and education will need to change. Our main findings are as follows. First, both oil depletion and climate change are serious and global problems. Second, technical fixes alone will not solve these problems, given the environmental problems of even ‘clean’ industrial systems. Third, it follows that industrial engineering teaching/practice will need to change, the extent of change depending greatly on both how serious the problems are, and the degree to which further technology can overcome them. Keywords: ecological sustainability, global climate change, industrial engineering education, oil depletion.

1. INTRODUCTION The world may soon face global environment/resource challenges include climate change and oil depletion. Accommodating the consumption aspirations of industrialising countries, particularly populous and fastgrowing China and India, in a world of finite resources and pollution absorbtion capacity, can only exacerbate these problems. Their per capita greenhouse gas emissions, and especially oil use, are today far below those for industrial countries. Predicting the future will always be difficult; however, we may be entering a period of even greater uncertainty. The uncertainty arises because although many, perhaps most, researchers view these potential global challenges as very serious, others either believe that the problems are overstated, or that a variety of ‘technical fixes’ can largely eliminate them. How will these potential problems impact on Industrial Engineering (IE)? If serious, they promise a sharp break with trends of the past half-century. For example, manufacturing is increasingly global in scope, relying on cheap freight transport of parts or finished products. Both production and consumption could be greatly changed as societies deal with the challenges discussed. Our paper has three tasks. It first examines the global sustainability challenges we face, particularly oil depletion and global climate change. It then

________________________________________ † : Corresponding Author

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critically assesses the available techical fix solutions, and finally discusses how IE practice/education would need to change to respond to these challenges.

2. GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGES Serious global sustainability problems include oil depletion, global climate change, loss of species diversity, loss of ecosystem services, the threat of pandemics, and water supply shortages. Because they are more relevant to IE, only the first two are considered further. However, we need to keep in mind that the other global problems act to constrain the possible solutions to the oil depletion and climate change challenges.

2.1 Global Oil Depletion Much controversy exists as to whether or not we will soon face a global oil crisis. The US government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that world demand for (and production of) oil in 2030 will be 118 million barrels per day (mbd) compared with around 84 mbd today (EIA 2006a and 2006b). In total contrast, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO)—whose key members are retired petroleum geologists—argue that production in 2030

annual oil use (barrels/capita)

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Figure 1: Per capita oil consumption in China, India, Japan and US, 1950-2004, with projections to 2030. will be only about 55 mbd (ASPO 2006). ASPO further argues that oil production will probably peak around 2010— only four years away. Clearly, they can’t both be right. The EIA figure is perhaps best interpreted as what the world would like to consume in 2030 if there were no constraints on oil supply. After all, if the entire world population in 2030—and the median UN projection for 2030 is 8200 million (UN 2005)— used oil at the same rate as the US presently does, total world oil consumption would be 626 mbd! Compared with this figure, 118 mbd seems modest. After falling during the 1980s, world oil demand is once again growing rapidly, with industrialising Asian countries— particularly China—responsible for most of the growth. China today is the world’s second largest importer of oil, but its 2004 annual per capita consumption of about 1.85 barrels is still less than 10% of that of the US, the leading importer, as shown in Figure 1 (BP 2005, EIA 2006). As can be seen from the figure, the EIA anticipate that a huge gap will still remain between the US and China and India in 2030. Interestingly, while per capita consumption in the US is expected to rise, a strong decrease is anticipated for the Japan, presumably because Japan still uses oil for 13 % of its electricity production (World Bank 2006). This oil can be replaced by other fuels. New oil-field capacity must be brought on line each year, not only to fuel rising demand, but also to cover depletion from older fields. Production capacity is what counts, not the total oil reserves remaining, which for OPEC anyway are the subject of considerable uncertainty (ASPO 2006, Campbell

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2006). It’s the size of the ‘pipe’ that’s important, not the size of the ‘tank’ This ‘pipe’ includes not only the annual production capacity of the world’s oil fields, but also the capacity of pipelines and tankers that move it to domestic or overseas refineries, and the output capacities of the refineries themselves. All must expand together if the growing demand for petroleum products is to be met. There is increasing evidence that the oil pessimists may be closer to the truth. Oil prices remain high, and will probably continue to do so unless a world recession lowers oil demand. Some Kuwaiti oil officials are now apparently acknowledging that Kuwait’s official oil reserve figures are inflated (ASPO 2006). Finally, the optimistic oil discovery forecasts of the US Geological Service (USGS) are not being borne out. In 2000, the USGS released detailed country by country forecasts for the 30 year period beginning in 1996. Both for the US, and for the world overall, their predictions fall far short of the discoveries actually made for the first decade of the three decades period (ASPO 2006, Moriarty 2006). However, despite the rhetoric, the differences between the two groups may be more apparent than real. Both the USGS, whose 2000 assessment underpins the EIA optimism, and ASPO agree that we face a real problem with future oil supply—it’s only in the timing of the crisis that they differ. ASPO think that global oil production will peak within a decade (ASPO 2006), whereas a senior USGS official argues that ‘We’ve got a real problem in 2 to 3 decades for oil’ (Kerr 2005).


For Asia, defined here as all Asian countries to China in the north and Pakistan in the west, the oil situation is even more critical. In 2005, Asia so defined had 55 % of the world’s population, but only about 3 % of its proven oil reserves (BP 2005, UN 2005, Campbell 2006). The region has one OPEC member, Indonesia, but this country has recently become a net importer of oil, as rising domestic oil demand overtook falling production (BP 2005). So far we have examined only the distribution of oil use per capita across selected countries from 1950, with a projection out to 2030 (Figure 1). But there is also a very different equity problem, that between present and future generations. The disagreement between ASPO and the USGS is very minor when it is realised that the earth has seen thousands of human generations. The only controversy between these two groups is whether this or the next generation experience the irreversible decline in oil availability—or as Colin Campbell (2006) calls it, the second half of the Age of Oil. The decline of oil reserves might not matter much if substitutes were readily available, but as we show below, such is not likely to be the case.

2.2 Global Climate Change Over the past two decades, the issue of global climate change has created extraordinary interest—and some controversy. Nevertheless, the vast majority of climate scientists support the view that emissions of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, particularly CO2, from fossil fuel combustion and land-use changes, cause global warming by altering the Earth’s radiation balance (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001). The topic of climate change is thus different from the oil depletion, where many experts can be found on both sides of the question. However, different global circulation models (GCMs) give very different values for climate sensitivity, the equilibrium increase in global temperature resulting from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Indeed, a team of U.K. researchers ran thousands of simulations using a standard GCM and found a range of climate sensitivities from 1.9 ºC to 11.5 ºC (Stainforth et al. 2005). This range is more than twice that reported by the IPCC (1.5-4.5 ºC) in their 2001 report (IPCC 2001). It suggests that there is a small but finite probability that temperature increases by the end of the 21st century will be twice the IPCC upper value. Such a large temperature increase would be catastrophic for humans. A more recent paper (Hegerl et al. 2006) uses past climatic data to argue that the 5 % to 95 % range for sensitivity is smaller, 1.5 to 6.2 ºC. The IPCC 2001 report also gave a projected range from 1.4 to 5.8 ºC for the temperature increases from 1990 to 2100, based on a large range of scenarios. Much of this range is due to the unavoidable uncertainty in estimating future emissions

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of greenhouse gases from fossil fuel burning and land use changes. But the large uncertainty in climate sensitivity estimates, discussed above, compounds the problem of prediction. Yet another cause of uncertainty is the possibility of large positive feedback effects. One feedback that could cause a big rise in 21st century emissions is large-scale methane release from northern tundra as the permafrost melts. There is some preliminary evidence that this process is already underway (Pearce 2005, Zimov 2006). Further, studies of past climate has shown that abrupt climatic change can occur over the course of a decade or even a few years (Overbeck and Webb 2000, Overbeck et al. 2006). We may need to act decisively— and soon. To limit dangerous climatic change, annual emissions to the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will need to be curtailed, if technical solutions, discussed below, prove inadequate. The changes required by countries like Australia and the US could be unprecedented. At present, both countries emit an average of over 18 tonnes of CO2 per capita (World Bank 2006). ‘Plan B’, a proposal with some official backing, including that of the U.K. government and the UN Environment Program, calls for all countries to converge on 1.1 tonnes carbon dioxide per capita by 2050 in order to avert dangerous climate change (Moriarty and Kennedy 2004). This or some similar plan would be the only one likely to be accepted by the world’s nations, since it is improbable that industrialising countries such as China or India will permanently accept lower per capita emissions than the already-industrialised countries. Clearly, minor adjustments to our energy policies won’t help much.

3. PROPOSED SOLUTIONS TO GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGES

3.1 Reducing Oil Use Increasingly in the future, reducing oil use will mean reducing transport oil use. After the oil crises of the 1970s, one response to higher oil prices and supply uncertainty was to reduce demand, mainly by substituting other fuels for oil wherever possible, particularly for electricity generation. Over 28% of global electricity was generated from oil in 1980, but today the corresponding figure is below 7 %. In Australia, it’s now only 1 % (World Bank 2006). This substitution approach was relatively easy for electricity generation, but its further application to the transport sector is difficult. A variety of alternatives to oil have been advocated for transport, including battery electric vehicles, ethanol or methanol made from biomass, synthetic fuels made from coal


or natural gas, and the present US favourite, hydrogen fuelcelled vehicles (Ashley 2005). In addition, Lovins has developed the Hypercar® concept vehicle (Lovins and Cramer 2004) a super-efficient passenger vehicle. Most of these proposed solutions to global oil depletion also aim to reduce transport emissions of CO2 as well. Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (HFCVs), once promised in 2004, have had their debut postponed for several decades. It may well be they will never achieve a significant market share—they face numerous problems in hydrogen storage, safety-related litigation potential, and fuel cell reliability. Their costs are also very high (Eliasson and Bossel n.d., Hammerschlag 2005, Moriarty and Kennedy 2004, Romm 2004, Shinar 2003). Enthusiasm for electric vehicles faded when the difficulty of storing sufficient energy in batteries became apparent, but recently, as the problems facing HFCVs are increasingly recognised, they have seen a revival in interest. The new focus is on battery hybrid vehicles, building on the success of the Prius and other commercially-available hybrid cars (Romm 2005, Brown 2006). The battery hybrid vehicle would normally run off an electric motor powered from rechargable batteries, but can also run on petrol from its small conventional engine. Apart from the higher cost of hybrid vehicles (further increased by the high cost and limited life of the battery pack), there is another constraint—availability of metals for the batteries if such vehicles became world standard (Andersson and Rade 2001, Ayres 2006). Platinum availability could also be a limiting factor for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, given both their reliance on platinum group metals, and existing important non-transport uses for this group of metals (Gordon, Bertram and Graedel 2006). LPG and compressed natural gas are useful alternatives to petrol and diesel, but are themselves hydrocarbon fuels in limited suppply. Australia, as well as many other countries including the US, the European Union (EU) and Brazil, are promoting biomass-based liquid transport fuels. The large US and Brazilian ethanol programs are based on corn and sugarcane respectively, the EU’s biodiesel fuels on rapeseed oil. All are food crops, which limits their expansion in a world which still has unmet food needs, and a still-growing population (Moriarty and Honnery 2005). Further, Patzek (2004) argues that for the US, ethanol would have a negative effect on US greenhouse gas emissions. A very different approach for reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and oil use is to improve the efficiency of petroleum-based transport. The argument is that if we use fewer litres of petrol or diesel per 100 km of vehicular travel, we can reduce total oil consumption. Does it really work this way? Car fuel efficiency in most countries hasn’t changed much over the past half-century, which raises the question of how easy it really is to improve fuel efficiency. Air travel

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provides a better illustration, since fuel efficiency—measured by fuel use per seat-kilometre—has improved by a remarkable 70% since the 1950s (Moriarty and Honnery 2004). But far from decreasing, global demand for aviation fuel has risen many-fold since the 1950s. It’s possible that, in countries like Australia and the US, where car ownership and car travel levels are near saturation, dramatic improvements in fuel efficiency—assuming they’re feasible—could cut national petrol demand. However, given the huge unsatisfied demand for private car ownership in Asia and elsewhere, global car efficiency improvements could follow air travel’s experience. Liu et al. (2006) discussed several scenarios for travel in Beijing for the year 2020, and also concluded that technical measures such as fuel efficiency improvements and use of alternative fuels would not be sufficient to solve that city’s air pollution problems, or reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, over recent decades, the modest gains achieved in vehicle engine efficiency in countries such as Australia have not led to significant fuel savings, but have instead been swallowed up in higher performance cars, air conditioning, and vehicle entertainment, information, safety and control systems. Road freight vehicles, which have much higher payload to gross mass ratios than passenger cars, have even less potential for efficiency improvements.

3.2 Global Climate Change Amelioration There are many seemingly good ideas for solving the global climate change problem. They can be grouped under four main headings. ‘Geo-engineering’ approaches include potentially risky attempts to increase planetary albedo (the proportion of incoming solar radiation reflected directly back to space) by placing aerosols or metal foil in the stratosphere. But as with climate sensivity discussed above, different models predict different outcomes, and some regions might benefit while others experienced climatic deterioration. For this reason, it would seem politically difficult to implement (Schneider 2001). The CO2 content of the atmosphere would also continue to rise—as would the CO2 content of the oceans. The pH of the oceans would fall as they acidified, with potentially serious consequences for aquatic ecosystems. For instance, shellfish may not be able to form their carbonate shells (Hecht 2005). The second approach is carbon sequestration in woody plants, ocean depths, disused gas and oil fields, or saline aquifers. Sequestering carbon in soil and plants entails no collection costs, and merely reverses soil/plant carbon losses of the past century. But carbon sequestration in forests could be reversed as temperatures rise (Meir et al. 2006). Deep ocean disposal has both high CO2 collection costs (both in money and energy


3.3 Discussion Figure 2 shows, for the year 2004, Gross National Income (GNI) per capita for all countries of Asia (as defined above),

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plotted against their 2004 electricity use per capita (World Bank 2006, EIA 2006c). GNI has been converted to international US dollars using purchasing power parity (PPP) rates. ‘An international dollar has the same purchasing power over GNI as a U.S. dollar has in the United States’ (World Bank 2006). It is evident that income and electricity use per capita are closely correlated, suggesting that it will not be easy to reduce growth in electricity use without also reducing GNI. The same point can be made about energy use in general. 40000 2004 GNI PPP $/capita

terms), technical problems, and probable environmental risks because of local pH change. In any case, carbon sequestered in soils, biomass, or oceans will sooner or later return to the atmosphere (Lackner, 2001). For aquifers and disused oil/gas fields CO2 will remain in storage much longer but leakage will still occur (Lackner 2001, Klusman 2003). If sequestration is adopted as the longterm solution, stored CO2 volumes will eventually be so large that even low rates of leakage will lead to total CO2 annual emissions rivalling present levels. The only permanent solution is to fix CO2 in carbonate rock—an even more expensive undertaking. The third approach would replace fossil fuels with noncarbon sources of energy. While there is scope for much larger use of renewables, all energy sources, renewable or not, will cause serious environmental problems with heavy use (Scott 2004, Moriarty and Honnery 2003). Nor are they climate neutral: in hydroelectric dams rotting vegetation releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and geothermal plants can emit CO2, in both cases compared with the original undisturbed site (Fearnside 2004, Rybach 2003). Biomass, the most extensively used renewable energy source, must increasingly compete with agriculture and forestry for fertile land and water. Already, in Asia, around 70 % of all net primary production of plant matter is appropriated by humans (Imhoff et al. 2004). Further production of biomass will require increased irrigation, which has heavy energy requirements. Indeed, the energy costs of irrigation pumping can outweigh the energy derived from the resulting harvested biomass (Moriarty and Honnery 2006). The fourth and final approach is to greatly improve the efficiency of all energy use in the economy—power stations, domestic appliances, transport vehicles, and all industrial processes and equipment. This approach also includes energy conservation measures—for example, using less lighting in offices, as well as using more efficient lighting such as compact fluorescent bulbs. Further, each of these basic approaches to ameliorating global climate change can consist of numerous sub-options; for example, renewable energy comes in many different forms. Even more challenging, each renewable energy option itself can be implemented in different ways. An extreme case is wave energy, where around 1000 different approaches have been proposed, although none stand out as being clearly superior to the others (Moriarty and Honnery 2005). Clearly then, we cannot consider all options. Instead we have tried to illustrate the problems that inevitably arise in an interconnected physical world.

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Figure 2: Per capita GNI at purchase parity prices vs per capita electricity use, Asian countries, 2004. In our earlier discussion on reducing oil use, we gave reasons why improving car fuel efficiency might not have much effect in reducing global oil demand. There appears to be a more general response to efficiency gains known as the ‘energy rebound effect’ (Brooks 2000, Huber and Mills 2005). It can operate at a sector level or even at the level of an entire economy: in Australia, the energy intensity of the economy (total primary energy/GNI) is decreasing, but primary energy use per capita is still rising. In other words, energy efficiency and per capita energy use are both growing together. Recycling of materials is a further approach advocated for decreasing the environmental impact of industry, and is already widely practiced. Ayres (2006), however, has pointed out a paradox: materials-use efficiency and recycling may sometimes be in conflict. He gives the example of three-way catalytic converters, where the very efficient use of platinum as a catalyst means that it is no longer economic to attempt to recycle it. Similarly, miniaturisation in the electronics and IT industries means that ‘the actual quantity of any given metal (such as copper) is too small a percentage of the total mass of electronic circuitry for economic recovery’. Overall, we conclude that solutions to the world’s environmental/resource challenges, such as use of alternative fuels and carbon sequestration, will not only prove expensive, but, given the magnitude of the reductions needed, will


deliver too little, too late (Moriarty and Honnery 2003, 2005). Similar conclusions have been reached by other researchers, for example Wackernagel et al. (2002) on the importance of the global challenges and Huesemann (2003) on the inability of tech fixes to solve them. If this view is correct, reducing the impact of climate change and oil depletion will require the world’s nations to make large reductions in total energy use.

4. IMPLICATIONS FOR INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING If IE is to prosper in the future, it cannot continue on its present path. We are not the first to suggest this. Way Kuo (2003) puts it very simply. ‘The writing is on the wall: Industrial engineering must change to survive’. He points out that over the past 15 years, many IE departments in the US have been eliminated or merged with other departments. Baily and Barley (2005) have recently described how IE departments in the US, since their foundation, have continuously adapted to industry and societal changes. But what should IE now change to? We have to be very careful here. A common criticism of much management writing and practice is that it is fad-driven (Shapiro 1995, Gibson et al. 2003). IE has not only to avoid the pitfall of decreasing relevance, but also that of responding too energetically to ideas for new directions that eventually prove to be passing fads. We can illustrate the reality of fads in engineering management by examining the fate of ‘business process reengineering’ (BPR), a popular management technique of the 1990s. We calculated the number of articles which discussed (or at least mentioned) BPR in each year from 1990 to 2005 in the Proquest® database of articles. This database today draws on over 11,400 publications worldwide. Since the number of publications in the database has increased severalfold over the period, the results were normalised by dividing each years’s total by that for the topic ‘business’. Figure 3 shows that BPR rose from zero % of ‘business’ articles in 1990 to around 0.8 % in 1994-95, before falling back to less than a tenth of that value by 2000. Other management innovations, such as ‘Total Quality Management’, and ‘Quality Circles’, show a similar rise and fall, although the peaks occur at different times. In contrast, ‘quality’ has only declined modestly in the past 25 years. (Note that the shape of the curves would be similar, if, instead of ‘business’, ‘management’ or even the common words ‘the’ or ‘a’ were used for the denominator.) The latter two words simply indicate the total number of articles in the Proquest®

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database. We propose here that ‘sustainability’ should be a core component of industrial engineering (IE) teaching and practice. Sustainability we define as meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations in Australia or elsewhere to satisfy their own needs. If our analysis in the earlier sections is correct, sustainability will not turn out to be a fad. This conclusion is supported by a frequency analysis of ‘sustainability’ in Proquest®, which shows a strong and continuous rise after the late 1980s. Again, we are not the first to suggest the need for an environmentally sustainable approach to engineering. A new journal, the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, has been published since 2000. Worldwide, a number of engineering schools have already started courses in sustainable engineering, or have integrated sustainability into existing courses. Examples include Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, the Polytechnical University of Catalonia in Spain, and Cambridge University in the UK (Mulder 2004, Fenner et al. 2005). In Australia, the University of Technology, Sydney, has led the way in incorporating sustainability in the engineering curriculum (Bryce et al. 2004). In our own city, Melbourne, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2005 began a Master of Engineering (Sustainable Energy) by coursework. The lead author has some involvement with this course, which is offered by the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. McGinnis (2002) reported on a meeting of the IIE Council of Fellows at the 2002 IEE Annual Conference in the US. The Fellows were likewise aware of the need for change in IE, and saw the practice of IE as being largely organised around three main themes: • • •

human work physical flows and conversion information flows.

The drive for environmental sustainability will no doubt impact on all three areas, but particularly on the second. Accordingly, the rest of this section will focus on this area. McGinnis regards physical flows and conversion as including: ‘packaging, containers, unit loads, material handling, material storage, manufacturing and warehousing processes, and the planning, management, and control of material flows.’ Physical flows from outside the factory will be greatly affected because there are orders of magnitude differences between the energy efficiencies of


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Figure 3: ‘Business process reengineering’ (BPR) as a % of ‘business’ articles in Proquest®, 1990 to 2005. the various available freight transport modes, with the fastest—unfortunately—usually the most energy inefficient, as the following circa 2000 values in Table 1 for the US and China show (Murtinshaw and Schipper 2001, Skeer and Wang 2006). Table 1: Energy efficiency of freight transport modes in China and the US (units are tonne-km/MJ). Freight mode Rail Water Road Air

China 3.3 4.8 0.25 0.06

US 4.0 3.6 0.34 0.08

Since nearly all transport (passenger as well as freight) uses petroleum-based fuels, the comparative values for oil use and greenhouse gas emissions will be similar to those for energy efficiency. Further, the least efficient mode, air freight, is also at present the fastest growing (Helms and Dileepan 2005). So just how will IE teaching/practice need to change in the future? Clearly the level of change depends on how serious we anticipate the environmental/resource problems to be. Here we assume the worst case to highlight the changes that might be needed. First, IE courses should include material on the main environmental/resource challenges facing the world, such as global oil depletion and climate change, treated in detail in section 2. These need to be treated

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from an ‘earth systems science’ perspective, so that the interconnectedness between the various environmental and resource challenges to sustainability can be seen. Also, they need to include a critical analysis of the proposed technical solutions to these problems, as outlined in section 3 above. (We stress that while any successes with techical fixes such as the ready availability of cheap alternative fuels or propulsion systems would require changes to mechanical engineering design, they would not require much change to IE practice or teaching.) Modern practices in warehousing and distribution, including ‘Just in Time’ practice, which assume that cheap and fast oil-based transport will be available for many decades to come, will need to change. Similarly, manufacturing itself would also be profoundly affected, with far greater emphasis on such overlapping concepts for sustainability as design for disassembly and reuse, ecological footprint analysis, cleaner production, and industrial ecology—which affects the location of related industries. These proposed solutions may prove sufficient if the challenges to the existing production and physical distribution system prove modest. But if the problems are found to be very serious, even solutions such as cleaner production will not be enough. For instance, the primary energy needed to manufacture a freight truck is only a small fraction of the primary energy consumed as fuel by the truck over its lifetime. As with logistics, the extent of change needed in IE depends heavily on both the seriousness and immediacy of the global challenges, and the scope for technical solutions to these problems.


5. CONCLUSIONS It’s at least possible that the world doesn’t face a sustainability problem, that continuing on as usual will prove to be a feasible policy. We may even discover that global climate changes will be minor, or that feedbacks will limit its impact; that global oil reserves turn out to be closer to the projections of the optimists rather than the pessimists; or that technical fixes to these environmental/resource challenges will become available. If so, we can all rest easy. IE may still need to change to survive as a separate discipline, but not necessarily in the ways discussed above. However, most indications are that global sustainability problems are serious, that they can only worsen, and that we need to act soon. We therefore suggest that ‘sustainability’ should be an important focus for IE in the future; indeed sustainability is already taught in a number of engineering courses worldwide. For IE, such an approach will have profound implications for its core activities of physical flows and materials conversion. How much change is needed depends on how serious global environmental/resource are likely to be in the future, and whether these necessitate reductions in energy use. However, these potentially serious challenges could also provide an opportunity for IE. A systems approach has always been important for IE, and the world’s future (possibly nearfuture) environment/resource challenges can only be overcome if a systems approach is adopted. Without such an approach, we will continue to solve one problem by making others worse.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES Patrick Moriarty is a researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Monash University, Australia. He received a BE (Civil) and MEngSci from the University of Melbourne, and a PhD from the University of Newcastle, NSW in 1971. He taught engineering management for many


years and his research interests include urban land use planning and transport, assessment of new energy sources for both transport and electricity generation, and transport and land use in Asian cities. His email address is Damian Kennedy is Senior Lecturer within the Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management program at Monash University. He holds degrees in electrical and

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communication engineering (RMIT 1974), management (RMIT 1977), enginering science (Northwestern 1979), and the PhD in industrial engineering (West Virginia 1988). He is currently Federal President of IIE (Australia). His teaching and research interests lie within the areas of industrial engineering and engineering management with particular reference to the design of effective and efficient productive systems.