Sustainable Design and Social Responsibility - Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering - page 196

The fourth area is clearly the domain of green engineering. However, the
others provide some of the constraints within which engineers, green and
otherwise, will have to work to advance the state of biomedicine. Engineers
as agents of technological progress are at a pivotal position. Technology will
continue to play an exponentially increasingly important role in the future. The
concomitant societal challenges require that every engineer fully understands
the implications and possible drawbacks of these technological breakthroughs.
Key among them will be biotechnical advances at smaller scales, well below the
cell and approaching the molecular level. Technological processes at these scales
require that engineers improve their grasp of the potential ethical implications.
The essence of life processes are at stake. Thus, these are the building blocks
of green design.
The evolution of green health care in the medical community may follow
paths similar to those of the corporate world's embrace of sustainable busi-
ness practices. Medicine is heavily dependent on technology, so as is true for
green engineering and architecture, the medical community's embracing of
sustainable approaches will probably be made easier with improved compu-
tational abilities and other tools that were not available at the outset of the
environmental movement. In fact, it we consider the principles of green engi-
neering described in Table B4.1, a number of biomedical aspects come to the
fore (see Table B5.2).

Table B5.2 Green Principles Potentially Applicable to Medicine

Design Principle Opportunities for Sustainable Biomedicine

Waste prevention Bioinformatics and data mining can provide

candidate syntheses and processes. Such
informatics techniques are used increasingly
in the medical community. They are not
only often more efficient than the old
paper-laden searches, but they can provide
insights on savings (e.g., energy, less
materials, etc.) when complementing
life-cycle analysis and environmental
management system
reviews.