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An essential aspect of engineering education is the provision of core competences in discipline specific knowledge and its application. Added to this, engineering education must equip its students with a range of transferable skills in order to facilitate their working within a variety of organisations, skills which are much valued by employers. Critically for the 21st century, engineering graduates entering the workforce must be equipped with knowledge and competences in sustainability / sustainable development, as this is becoming more and more important within organisations. More importantly it is an existential imperative for humanity, which is of particular relevance to young people, including newly graduated engineers who must be equipped with sustainability knowledge and competences to effectively contribute to the good of a society that needs to transition to a sustainable pathway. Such competencies are also required by professional accreditation organisations. This may require paradigmatic change in how we view both our profession and the world we inhabit. This paper briefly highlights a number of proposed sustainability related skills and competences. It then focuses on the development of these through open-ended activities and problems. This is based on the active learning premise where students achieve better quality learning by actively doing things themselves. The paper outlines four examples of activities undertaken at University College Cork and at the University of Seville. They include a transdisciplinary group exercise, environmental consultancy role-play, sustainability / environmental debates, and converting a closed well-defined problem into an open-ended one followed by the addition of layers of complexity and holistic considerations. It highlights the learning outcomes, transferable skills and sustainability knowledge and competences that students may obtain from undertaking the highlighted activities.

This paper is presented within the broader theme of considering what non-engineering-discipline specific sustainability / sustainability development (SD) knowledge and competences should be included in engineering education, in particular for four year undergraduate or four to five year integrated master’s programmes. Over the last 20 years, sustainability / SD has grown in importance, and consequently many engineering programmes have endeavoured to integrate it within their programmes. The UCC chemical engineering is one of these programmes. The inclusion of sustainability / SD content inherently contains engineering discipline specific content, but also includes content that is non-discipline specific and could potentially be undertaken by any engineering student. This paper looks at the University College Cork (UCC) Process and Chemical Engineering programme, and outlines the content that is considered as non- discipline specific. This includes the following which are briefly outlined in more detail within the paper: Basic concepts in sustainability and SD: What is it all about? The importance of framing; The environmental dimension, ecological systems thinking and importance of ecological limits; The role of environmental legislation; Humanity’s grand challenges; the food-energy-water nexus and climate change; The game-changer: The socio-economic dimension (including ecological economics); its essential role in transitioning to and maintaining a sustainable society; its impact on engineering and to what extent engineering can have influence on the socio-economic dimension; Holistic thinking; inherent interconnectedness, life cycle thinking and assessment; Energy, its importance and its commonality to all engineering disciplines, and beyond; Acquiring soft skills of critical thinking, communication, working with others, embracing uncertainty and complexity; Transdisciplinarity, emergent knowledge, and the need to be able to work with others outside our disciplinary “silo”; Values, ethics and the normative nature of sustainability choices and narratives; Worldviews, paradigms, and links with consumptive growth (material, energy, information); Transformational change; going beyond the quantitative and reductionist and the role of narrative, imagination, myth and metaphor in precipitating authentic societal and cultural change.

This paper envisages a masters level module, as part of an integrated masters level degree in chemical engineering (but which can also be taken by other engineers, such as energy engineers), as a suitable module for bringing together broader (societal level) considerations around the implications of contemporary carbon cycle disruption with possible interventions. These would include interventions in particular at the technological level, through the preferential capture, storage and utilisation of carbon. In this way, the module can build on standard undergraduate chemical engineering modules in unit operations, mass transfer and environmental engineering to (while by drawing on research informed expertise of the lecturer) consider specific potential technological interventions in the CCS and utilisation space. It can also however both draw on and add to prior learnings from broader contexts and domains such as in the realms of industrial ecology, ecological economics, technological indeterminism, sustainability narratives and policy, in particular through the use of an overarching context of carbon cycles. It also affords the opportunity for graduate students to develop critical thinking in relation to an ever-evolving socio-technological, economic and policy landscapes, and to help the goal of facilitating the development of fit-for-purpose engineering graduates in the wake of the consequences of ruptured carbon cycles.

Since writing about the ‘the need to embed sustainability’ into chemical engineering programmes in a 2009 paper (Byrne & Fitzpatrick, 2009), the authors have endeavoured to walk the walk by helping embed sustainability into the Process & Chemical Engineering undergraduate degree programme at University College Cork. This has been achieved both through the development of ‘primary’ bespoke modules with explicit sustainability related foci, as well as through the development of a coherent sustainability related context right throughout the programme, and across modules more generally. Nearly a decade on, this approach yielded international recognition, with a successful submission by the authors on behalf of their programme, which resulted in the award of the 2016 Teaching Sustainability Award by the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), an award given with the purpose of ‘encouraging the development of better approaches to integrating sustainability principles and values into undergraduate teaching’ among IChemE accredited programmes globally. This paper provides a reflective account of the evolution (in thinking and practice) made to the Process & Chemical Engineering degree at University College Cork over the past number of years on its sustainability journey, from the perspective of the authors who have championed this journey, and demonstrates how a confluences of various environmental factors, operating at various levels, can help facilitate iterative change and development.