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Being different from environmentalism, green engineering is to develop a better method to produce and solve the problems concerning both environmental needs and human being’s desires. This eventually creates a perfect cycle which human waste promotes the environment and the environment’s waste contributes to human development. People cannot live or even survive without others’ assistance and compromise, in the same way humans heavily depend on the environment. So, green engineering is putting the environment back to priority, trying to find a method to balance environmental needs and human being’s desires and making the environment or humans better off without making the other worse off. To obtain a better idea what green engineering is, three different frameworks of green engineering will be discussed and contrast in the following paragraphs.

In Green Technology and Design for the Environment, Billatos claims that waste reduction, material management, toxics management, pollution prevention and product enhancement are the methods to pursue green engineering. (Billatos) Waste Reduction advises on designing for reducing the economic cost as well as benefiting the environment by reducing the material usage, labor and equipment. In addition, it also suggests increasing the duration of the products and decreasing the material usage and operation cost after the production is discarded on the design stage. While Waste Reduction suggests reducing waste by shortening the input of resources, Material management suggests reusing the component or material when the product no longer has value. For this recycling purpose, Billatos suggests following three categories. Design for recycling, design for disassembly and toxic management. Before m...

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...cDonough, William and Braugart, Michael，63) It is not worth using less steel and concrete to tradeoff long term safety. In brief, efficiency does not always mean good, it depends on what does it tradeoff.

Two things are finite, resource on the earth and human intelligence, and which is the former? This is imitating words that Einstein said when he was confused about whether the universe dies first or the human finds out the edge of the universe first. Similarly, people should start to question whether the earth and human die first or humans find out a way to get rid of the threat of the environment. For this reason, responsibility of green engineering is to extend the life of the earth as well as human life while people operate to fulfill their needs. To do so, Designers need to develop better processes with limited use of resources and restrict waste production.