Everyone cares about the environment — until it’s time to pay for it

At best, it should have been relatively equilibrated, and not the order of magnitude difference that he was seeing. He quickly realised that this was from the use of leaded fuel and the emissions going into the atmosphere. Lead doesn’t break down and doesn’t decay. It’s a metal, a base element. So it would get deposited throughout the world.

Based on this information, Patterson decided he would sue General Motors Corporation, which was one of the biggest automobile manufacturers at the time, and it still is. So General Motors also hired their own expert, Robert Kehoe, who was a toxicologist and pathologist at the time. His message was that the presence of lead in humans and other organisms was normal and that exposure to low lead levels was not harmful.

This led to a decades-long, epic battle trying to get lead out of fuel. And I’m going to draw on some of these analogies on how we again as engineers and scientists can put sustainability and the environment at the centre of everything that we do.

Costs of remediation

I’m an environmental engineer. A lot of people ask me what environmental engineers do. Well, there’s a variety of different things that we can do but I focus on anthropogenic contamination in the environment, looking at soil, groundwater, surface water and assessing those problems. 

I often joke that we clean up the messes that other engineers make. Often it’s a very thankless job and it costs money off the bottom line for our clients, which is also not usually very much appreciated.

So I look at remediating these problems, and that has a very large carbon footprint. Once chemicals get in the environment, it’s very expensive and difficult to get them out of the environment. 

We often talk about the carbon footprint of the remediation, but we don’t often talk about the assessment component of that, where you collect hundreds of samples, then the client goes from one consultant to another because they didn’t like the answer or they want to save a little money. So we need to also, at least in my industry, look at sustainable assessment and remediation, and try to streamline that assessment process.

On the converse, looking at other engineering problems, often we jump to solutions as quickly as we possibly can. We go from A to B to C to D to get to that answer. But staying in the problem is usually where we find the most innovative answers to these problems and not just jumping to the business-as-usual answer.

Diversity of thought

So we need to start looking at really staying in the problem and bringing diverse cohorts of people together so that they can solve some of these really difficult and wicked problems that we’re facing.

We need a seat at the table. If you’re like me, sometimes when you get a request for a proposal, tender or brief, half the solution is worked out. A client is hiring you to implement the solution that we’ve already decided on. Just do it in this timeframe and for this amount of money. Innovation is great just as long as it costs anything or doesn’t change what we’ve already decided.

Doing what you’re told

Usually engineers are told what to do, and we go about and do it. And if we won’t do it, then somebody else will; another consulting firm will go in and solve the problem. 

This goes directly back to Patterson, who tried to get a seat at the table. He tried to join the National Institute of Health in the United States, the National Science Academy and other federal regulatory bodies, and he was shut out. Nobody wanted to hear what he had to say, because he was challenging the status quo in a major way.

We, as technical people, need to have a seat at the table and need to really challenge ourselves to be part of the political debate. Run for office, run for local council. We need technical people — not just lawyers and businesspeople — running the government.

We need to have advisors to ministers because we need to influence these holistic solutions and sustainable solutions. Often politicians just want to cut a big red ribbon and say, “Look what I’ve done for my constituents”, where they’ve upgraded a kilometre stretch of road, but by the time the road’s built the traffic’s just as bad as it was, or worse than before.

We need to start looking at precinct-level and holistic solutions. 

Diverse, inclusive and T-shaped workforce

We hear a lot about gender balance in engineering. There are a lot of aspects to diversity including age, neurodiversity, disability, sexual identity and gender identity. All of these things work into the people that are within your organisation and within your problem-solving team. 

Inclusivity is creating psychologically safe spaces to allow this diverse cohort to work out problems, hash it out and bring different perspectives and ways to solve problems that would regularly be on the table.

If you had a team of eight people that all have the same background and perspective, how would you ever expect innovation to happen? Innovation happens in those uncomfortable spaces where we’re really operating at the edges of our expertise, and we’ve got people challenging our thoughts and the ways that we have approached these problems in the past.

The T-shaped workforce is having a depth of expertise in your particular area, but also a breadth across other disciplines so that you know how multidisciplinary solutions can be implemented and how they all can work together and not just focus on one aspect of what you do best, but instead of what everybody does best.

We hear about collaboration a lot. I had the privilege of attending a research expo at Macquarie University a few weeks ago and there was a lot of talk about how academia, industry and government still need to collaborate quite well in bringing inventions to innovation. Industry needs to be involved in academia to commercialise these ideas before they get too far into research.

Collaboration between consultants, construction contractors, and government and policy, is often still an adversarial process. We must bring everybody to the table, coming to the best solutions and breaking down the barriers that have precluded these solutions in the past.