I am completing a few searches right now for sustainability professionals with engineering backgrounds. It got me to thinking about what makes an engineer a good sustainability professional.
Last year, while researching chief sustainability officers, I noticed a number of CSOs who come from engineering backgrounds. For example, Albemarle CSO David Clary, Dow Chemical CSO David Kepler, and Jarden Corp. CSO Jim Bennet are chemical engineers. Owens-Corning’s Frank O’Brien-Bernini is a mechanical engineer while YUM Brands’ Roger McClendon is an electrical and computer engineer.
Why so many engineers in a role that primarily involves communications and external affairs — with change management, behavioral learning and constant innovation thrown in for good measure? How does an intensive and concentrated education track like engineering become a prerequisite for sustainability chiefs?
Data, Data, Data
First, engineers tend to be more methodical and detail-oriented. They improve current systems and develop new ones using hard data. This scientific, deductive approach to sustainability differs from a more social and intuitive one. Though both types of professionals are valuable, a scientific process tends to be more effective at improving things like energy efficiency and calculating environmental costs.
In trying to reduce their carbon footprint and environmental impact, companies consider every contributory factor and how their systems can be altered and improved upon. Engineering skills then become valuable assets.
Gears illustration by vectomart via Shutterstock. Photocollage by GreenBiz Group.
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We as engineers are needed to
We as engineers are needed to help bring technical expertise and some sense of rational thought to the current religion of sustainability and continue to aid in the slow death of the never-ending global warming scaremongering. At the local level we need to help filter what is myth and what is actual data.
Really? You're going to use
Really? You're going to use Albemarle as an example? One of the companies responsible for polluting our planet with unnecessary, ineffective and toxic flame retardants along with their deceptive marketing and lobbying practices? Their "Earth Wise" flame retardants are bromine-based and nobody knows what the toxicological and lifecycle profiles are. These "Citizens for Fire Safety" members pay for deception of our legislators to benefit themselves alone, and should be summarily marched into jail cells.
Any professional requires
Any professional requires credibility to influence other staff to change their processes and behavior. This is especially true for sustainability professionals, who don't have large staffs to implement plans, and must rely on other resources within the company to get things done. In a company with an "engineering culture", engineers tend to have more credibility. Both real and perceived capacities and skills are important to establish credibility.
Because they relay on
Because they relay on deprecession more then aprication a machanised economy based on devaluation