Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 25, 2008|Volume 36, Number 27

In her course "Green Engineering and Sustainable Design," Julie Beth Zimmerman challenges her students to devise practical solutions to real-world problems.

Students learning to blend economic savvy and environmental awareness in Zimmerman’s course

In this issue, we introduce a new feature, “The Creative Classroom,” looking at the ways some of Yale’s innovative instructors are inspiring their students to think and learn in new ways.

Julie Beth Zimmerman’s students enter her classroom one morning and immediately find themselves in the Tanzanian village of Ngelenge, struggling to design a new water system for $2,000 that meets performance as well as environmental, health and social considerations.

The Yale students are also trying to balance the often-competing interests of health officials, teachers, villagers and private engineers about where to commit scarce resources when working in the developing world. They must consider: Should the school, garden or health dispensary get priority?

The next week, the students will be on the floor of an Adidas shoe manufacturing plant trying to improve how the company’s shoes are made. Three weeks ago, they were in an electronics company headquarters, determining the most environmentally — and economically — sensible design for a new product.

In many of Zimmerman’s classes, the students find themselves in a real (if virtual) place, searching for ecologically sound solutions to very real problems. Where you only rarely find her students is sitting in their chairs, passively listening to her speak.

“The great thing about teaching at Yale,” Zimmerman says, “is that the students continue to amaze me with their creativity and innovation in developing new solutions to a wide variety of sustainability challenges.”

Zimmerman, who came to Yale from the University of Virginia less than two years ago, is an assistant professor jointly appointed to the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. She is also the assistant director for research at the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale. She is a leader in the increasing global movement to design and build environmentally benign and sustainable products. Her ideals are outlined in “Twelve Principles of Green Engineering,” which she co-authored with Yale’s Paul. T Anastas, director of the center.

Her course “Green Engineering and Sustainable Design” is based on those principles and is one of the most popular classes in the engineering school.

Zimmerman’s passion is not rooted in abstract theory, but in the hard and tangible challenges posed by places such as Ngelenge, where ideas alone cannot provide clean water, safe food or reliable energy. In Ngelenge, at the design table of a global company or in her classroom, pragmatism weds principle, contends Zimmerman.

“She understands the urgent need to educate students to be economically savvy as well as environmentally aware,’’ says engineering student Ezekiel Fugate.

As part of the Ngelenge project, students hear the arguments of private engineers who suggest that metal pipes or those made of composite plastics are the most durable and efficient material villagers could use for their water systems. But the students debate this suggestion. Metal can corrode over time and plastics leach chemicals into the soil — besides, neither of these materials is locally made, they note. And there are other factors to consider, they point out: Will the money to buy these higher cost materials ever turn up? Will the pipes be stolen once they arrive? Would storage tanks made of native rock be a better solution?

Students must consider the issues that divide the villagers as well: Should scarce water resources, for instance, be diverted from the infirmary to the garden, which is one of the few sources of income for the village?

Each student is left to struggle with these and dozens of other questions that arise from the simple $2,000 project.

In her first year of teaching at Yale, Zimmerman tailored her course to draw on the experiences of her graduate assistants — such as Maggie Montgomery, who has been to Ngelenge and worked on designing a system to catch rainwater. Montgomery and Zimmerman worked together to design a study section that would capture the complexity of the issues involved in designing sustainable systems for the developing world.

“This is a real village, real people, with a real problem,” Montgomery says.

Zimmerman, standing with her back to the classroom wall, watches quietly as these discussions unfold. Occasionally, she will stop to hammer home the lesson that green engineers can only reach their goal by navigating a maze of often conflicting cultural, political, environmental, health and economic factors that are not unique to the developing world. The course emphasizes design and innovation as key components to creating and implementing sustainable solutions — no matter whether the design challenge is for a new product or a new policy.

And she never lets her students forget this axiom: It always makes sense to design and build green sustainable systems from the start because it is at the design stage that there is the most power and potential to make green systems a reality. She emphasizes that cleaning up environmental pollution or managing human health risks after the fact is expensive and often ineffective.

“On her office door she had a sign saying ‘Things to do today: 1. Save the world,’” Fugate says. “I knew she was exactly the person I needed to guide me.’

— By Bill Hathaway

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IN MEMORIAM

Dr. Steven Hebert: Discoveries illuminated kidney processes

G.K. Hunter: Was a scholar of Renaissance literature