Talk:Environmental engineering

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 14 January 2019 and 2 April 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: WumboWaffles.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:41, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

This article should also be in the Chemical engineering category
It may also be considered a ramification of Chemical Engineering. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.110.158.253 (talk • contribs) 24 June 2003 (UTC)
 * I agree and it is now so categorized. - mbeychok 00:43, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Moved from article
"Two of the principal current environmental problems are
 * the increasing number of humans on Earth. Along this line, one of the first applications of environmental engineering is the removal of sewage from cities, which became increasingly important as population grew. There were (and still is in many countries) initially no treatment : wastes are for example simply brought to the nearest stream. However, since sewage disposal eventually cause damages to natural waters, methods of treating wastewaters prior to discharge were developed.
 * the second major factor is the rising standard of living in many nations, such as in Europe and Australia. A higher living standard generate more consumption of natural resources and more pollution." hi

I buy part of the the first and not the second, there is lots of evidence that developing nations pollute more capita than developed nations because of lack of pollution control.

At any rate, these belong in discussion of environment more than environmental engineering which is not really concerned with either population control or standard of living, but rather more narrow engineering issues. dml 13:52, 24 June 2003 (UTC)


 * I disagree with you. I was trying to give to environmental engineering a historical perspective. These engineering techniques are not only about environmental issues, but also about health issues. I think a topic gains at being properly introduced, rather than giving links to other topics and letting the reader try to envision for which reasons env. eng. was developped.


 * Env. Eng. developped much sooner than environmental issues were ever raised up. And they developped primarily because some production of waste generated by a growing population could not be managed by environment natural clean-up services quickly enough to avoid human health issues. Typically, european cities began to suffer from accumulation of wastes, and decrease of water quality in middle ages. Before that, cities were small enough that it did not cause any major health issues. Then at some point, the wastes began badly accumulating in the street, that water carried microorganims which caused the huge epidemics, then env. eng. was set up. It was essentially then, setting up pipes to move dirty water out of the city. Napoleon building Paris sewage system. Only later, in the early 1900 did env. eng. techniques began to take care of cleaning the waste water.


 * This does not mean there were necessarily environmental damages then. There were health issues mostly. That is why I think *this* does belong here, and not in the environment article which is a different topic.


 * As for the second paragraph you don't buy, please then rephrase it. There is nothing wrong with it. It only states obvious points. Right now, developped nations consume more than before, and the more is consumed, the more wastes are generated. It does not matter that regulations are set up. A regulation alone won't lower the amount of waste. Only more (or different) clean up techniques used by industries (for example) pushed by regulations will.


 * It may be insufficient for the whole article. But, what I mostly wanted to refer to are the historical reasons why env. eng. originally developped. It is true that now, with pollution control, situation is different, but I see not why we should not put historical context under the reason the situation may be different now.


 * I intend this article to be more than two poor paragraphs, and not to be only about modern env. eng. in the modern states. There is more to say about it than just that. So, please edit instead of removing. I will try to improve later. anthere 22.56 24 June, 2003

Merged the "Environmental engineer" article into this article
I have just completed the merging of the "Environmental engineer" article into this article. I have deleted most of the resulting redundant Wiki links ... but there are probably still some that need deleting.

The "Environmental engineer" article, after merging into this one, was converted into a redirect to this article.

I am not sure that the "Other applications" sub-section in this article serves any useful function. Personally, I think it should be deleted. Perhaps some of the links in that section could be re-located into the "See also" section. What do others think? - mbeychok 00:04, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Amenity & Aesthetics
Many engineers and their clients would extend the scope of Environmental Engineering somewhat wider than the current article. While dust and noise get brief mentions, there are those who would extend Environmental Engineering to include indoor heating and ventilation (artificial climate) control, use of natural and artificial lighting of enclosed spaces, ambience, acoustics, etc. No doubt this derives from a broader definition of environment than is implicit in the current article. Perhaps the article should be extended, therefore, to include the engineering of artificial or interventionalist environments.

Certainly, environmental engineers are not only engaged in the restoration of 'natural' environments as the current article seems to assume. In fact environmental engineering is often engaged in the 'improvement' of environments for the benefit of mankind. Used in this way there will often be arguments about whether environmental engineering is desirable or not. A case in point is the use of coastal defences to prevent or delay erosion of coastlines. For the farmer or householder who owns coastal property, groynes (etc.) are a beneficial environmental engineering intervention. For many environmental scientists, this is unwarranted intervention which is upsetting the natural erosional/depositional balance of this, and adjacent, locales. Sometimes, environmental engineering might even be compared with landscape gardening whereby a perfectly acceptable environment is heavily modified to turn it into some other kind of environment. On occasion this can be merely indulgent for a rich landowner who wants some feature on his estate, but this approach is increasingly being used to provide more habitats of a particular kind that have never existed at that point before - the generation of wetlands to provide bird, fish and plantlife is a relatively frequent example. It would be useful if the article was to cover this point, too.

Finally, the article should point out that restoration, in practice, often means restoration to a pre-industrial condition, not to a pre-human condition. It is still intervention, hopefully beneficial. 128.243.220.41 (talk) 14:11, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

what are the subject involve in these course —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.220.19.74 (talk) 15:36, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

pls i need a writeup on the Role of Environmental Engineering on the society —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.14.85.242 (talk) 14:42, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Refrain mistake
In the third paragragh of general statement, the last sentence "Some subdivision of environmental engineering include natural resources engineering, agricultural engineering, and agricultural engineering." involves unnecessary refrain of "agricultural engineering". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:DA8:203:CB85:844B:AFB4:6A4A:C9F9 (talk) 00:57, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Research Process and Methodology - SU22 - Sect 202 - Tue
— Assignment last updated by OneGoodNut (talk) 17:27, 23 July 2022 (UTC)


 * @Dc4825 The scentece you added is unclear: "While on the part of civil engineering, the Environmental Engineering is focused mainly on Sanitary Engineering". Could you expand on what you mean? Unbeatable101 (talk) 12:35, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: English Composition 2
— Assignment last updated by ENCPROJ. (talk) 04:47, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Groundwater - a major topic for Environmental Engineering
Should I add Groundwater as a topic in this article somewhere? In the Australian context, Groundwater doesn't fit neatly under "Water pollution", as Environmental Engineers use groundwater hydrology science to report on sustainable water management, in particular where large mining projects extract quantities of water large enough to impact quite distant farming communities. Civil engineering projects can have a significant impact on the groundwater environment.

At RMIT, Melbourne, Australia, the most common "major" in Environmental Engineering degree is in "Groundwater", where students study hydrogeology and related sciences) for Environmental Engineering practice.

Bachelor of Engineering (Environmental Engineering) Degree, 'Groundwater' major https://iah.org/education/professionals/degree-courses/environmental-engineering-including-groundwater-options

Permacultura (talk) 03:25, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Removed section "Mass Balance"
This section was out of place in an overview article on environmental engineering. It is a calculation and analysis technique engineers use but is too detailed for this article. Other detailed tasks environmental engineers do are not in the article. Further, it is poorly written:

"Consider a man made chemical that we wish to find the fate of in relation to time, position, some phase of matter, or flow of a liquid. We represent the measured change in concentration as a function of all the rates of change that effect that clump of chemical matter.

$$V{dC \over dt}=\sum({d^bm \over dt^b})$$

"Meaning that for some control volume, the change in concentration versus change in linear independent time is equal to the sum of whatever changes are occurring in (+) and out(-) of that control volume. This is allowed for a few different reasons:

(1) Conservation of mass.$$totalmass=mass_a+mass_b+mass_c...mass_n$$(2) Representation as an ordinary differential equation.

$$a_0(x)y +a_1(x)y' + a_2(x)y'' +\cdots +a_n(x)y^{(n)}+b(x)=0,$$

(3) A solution exists.

"Although differential equations can be intimidating, this formula for a change in the concentration for a control volume per time is very versatile even without calculus. Take for instance the common scenario of a tank containing a volume with a contaminant of a certain concentration. Given that there is a first order reaction -kC taking place and that the tank is in steady state the effluent concentration becomes an expression of the initial concentration, the reaction constant k, and the hydraulic retention time (HRT) which is equal to the quotient of the volume of the tank by the flow.

$$C=C_0/(1+\tau*k)$$ "

Carax (talk) 18:03, 10 June 2023 (UTC)