Sustainable Engineering Design Audit (SEDA) Part II: Investigations in implementing environmental accounting at engineering companies in major Canadian cities
Sustainability continues to be one the most critical issues of the 21st Century. Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) are a popular research topics as academia looks to promote sustainability within industry. Small to mid-sized Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) firms in Canada remain outside the capable bounds of the expensive and complex tools and consultation required to develop their organizations strategic framework to include, track and innovative with sustainability measures. The purpose of the proposed research is to determine the effectiveness of the Sustainability Engineering Design Audit (SEDA) at implementing sustainability parameters into the decision making process of these firms. SEDA is a software tool that seeks to meet these needs by offering a streamlined LCA in the feasibility phase of an engineering project providing data on environmental parameters to engineering decision makers. The research will address this issue through four focus points:
– Streamlining the LCA process for EPC projects; minimizing complexity while maintaining a significant level of accuracy
– Determine the level of impact various environmental parameters have on the outcome of the decision process
– Finding the most effective way to present the user interface that minimizes user-experienced complexity
– Implementing environmental constraints into the software’s capabilities and adding sensitivity analysis for the various parameters in completing these objectives, SEDA will transfer valuable academic knowledge into Canadian industry, specifically engineering companies of small to medium size (SME). Organizations will learn of sustainability, develop in-house sustainability accounting, and do so more cost-effectively and simply to become effective players in becoming environmentally responsible.
