Integrating Sustainable Product Development Into the Engineering Curriculum

Criterion 3c for the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology specifies that

“Engineering programs must demonstrate that their students attain … an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability and sustainability.” In partial fulfillment of this objective, the Kate Gleason College of Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology has introduced an interdisciplinary minor program of study that is available to all engineering undergraduates and to other technically oriented students. This paper describes the general configuration of programmatic minors at RIT and the specific structure of the new interdisciplinary minor in Sustainable Product Development.