Dealing with societal challenges of a circular economy in engineering education

On December 2nd, 2015 the European Commission published a new Circular Economy Package to stimulate Europe's transition towards a circular economy, aimed at boosting global competitiveness, fostering sustainable economic growth, decreasing carbon emissions, and generating 580,000 new jobs. The engineers educated today will be key role players in this ambitious plan. An important focus in circular economy education lies in aspects of resource efficiency, using less raw materials and energy, and innovative processes and products. Whereas this is a certainly challenging to stimulate the creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial spirit of engineering students, social aspects of the circular economy perspective cannot be neglected and definitely deserve more attention. Both producers and consumers play a role in the transition towards a circular economy. Although general public awareness about the circular economy will likely increase in the coming years, usability, acceptability, and user incentives are essential to design successful circular systems. It is here that engineers can play an important role, in engineering and designing their products so that they are accepted by the consumers. Besides the environmental impact of materials and products over their entire life cycle, social impacts (such as the social well-being of different actors and stakeholders in the value chain of a product), are receiving more and more attention. Social wellbeing is not only enhanced through resource efficiency improvements, but also by issues of societal concern, for example: job creation, labor conditions, transparent communication about a product (over its entire life cycle), etc. In the present paper, we discuss some examples of how the societal impact of the circular economy concept can be addressed in courses and curricula in engineering education and beyond. Attention is paid to the role of life cycling thinking in adopting the circular economy concept, thus addressing environmental, economic, and social aspects. Examples also show the importance of taking into account consumer behaviour to analyse problems associated with human use of goods and services, within a circular economy framework Finally, we illustrate some interesting examples on truly interdisciplinary (student) projects.

ISBN:978-90-903-0131-0

Jaar van publicatie:2016

Toegankelijkheid:Open