Engineering for Sustainable Development - an Obligatory Skill of the Future Engineer

In the last 10 - 15 years we have witnessed a development from awareness of environmental problems to more and more articulated requirements for a sustainable development. The term sustainable industrial production/development includes three responsibilities - namely the economical, the environmental and the social/societal. The economical responsibility is handled by the well-known and accepted methods/tools/regulations, to handle the environmental responsibility good engineering methods and tools are appearing, but to handle the social/societal responsibility only fragmented and inconsistent elements exist. However, one thing is clear - we will have to provide our engineering students with understanding, methods and tools so that they can engineer sustainable solutions - especially engineer environmentally friendlier solutions. The Department of Manufacturing Engineering and the Institute for Product Development have actively taken part in the development from awareness of the environmental problems to providing methods and tools to support a sustainable development. The situation today in the education at DTU is shortly mentioned and the education at the Department of Manufacturing Engineering is described a bit more in detail as well as a short mentioning of the research and industrial consulting. It is mandatory in the future that the environmental discussion in the engineering practice can be handled by engineering scientific methods and tools - and that we are educating our engineers to do so.