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20 - Case Studies of Product Life Cycle Environmental Impacts for Teaching Engineering Ethics

from Part III - Engineering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2019

By
Matthew J. Eckelman ,
John Basl ,
Christopher Bosso ,
Jacqueline A. Isaacs  and
Kathleen Eggleson
Edited by
Ali E. Abbas
Ali E. Abbas
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

Given the rapid rate of technological innovation and a desire to be proactive in addressing potential ethical challenges that arise in contexts of innovation, engineers must learn to engage in value-sensitive design – design that is responsive to a broad range of values that are implicated in the research, development, and application of technologies. One widely-used tool is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Physical products, as with organisms, have a life cycle, starting with extraction of raw materials, and including refining, transport, manufacturing, use, and finally end-of-life treatment and disposal. LCA is a quantitative modeling framework that can estimate emissions that occur throughout a product’s life cycle, as well as any harmful effects that these emissions have on the environment and/or public health. Importantly, LCA tools allow engineers to evaluate multiple types of environmental and health impacts simultaneously and are not limited to a single endpoint or score. However, LCA is only useful to the extent that its models accurately include the full range of values implicated in the use of a technology, and to the extent that stakeholders, from designers to decisionmakers, understand and are able to communicate these values and how they are assigned. Effective LCA requires good ethical training to understand these values.

Type
Chapter
Information
Next-Generation Ethics
Engineering a Better Society
 , pp. 291 - 312
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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