APEGS Environmental Guidelines For Engineers

The Environment Committee of APEGS has made a set of general guidelines for its members for the sustainability and protection of the environment. These guidelines are to offer guidance, increase awareness and promote proactive environmental stewardship within APEGS membership.

It is a must for an engineer to take issues related to health, safety and the environment seriously. They must protect the well-being of the coming generations by working for the welfare of ecosystems. The main purpose of doing so is to improve the quality of human life.

Therefore, members of APEGS are expected to positively contribute to the economy, society and the environment. Having read these guidelines, you will have a deep and complete understanding of the role and responsibilities that an engineer has to bear in the province. It doesn’t matter how big a project you have taken; you must not go against these environmental guidelines.

APEGS Guidelines for the welfare of the environment:

You must cooperate with others:

• Offer your 100% cooperation to other experts to recognize the impacts of the policies, designs and processes and work hard to develop solutions to lessen or eliminate such impacts.
• Promote compliance with sound practices related to the environment.
• Ask clients and employers to pay attention to the environmental change due to operations and processes and tailor systems as per the result found.
• Make sure that there is proper comprehensiveness and documentation to environment-related problem-solving.
• Communicate effectively with the government, public and clients to allow informed decision making. Set up procedures, as needed, to ease such cooperative communication.
• Ensure that professional rules for health, safety and environmental rules are followed.

Acknowledge your role for the welfare of the environment:

• Know your role in fulfilling sustainability goals and use your role for the welfare of the public and environment.
• Work hard to protect the environment and human health via advocating, making and using environmental protection and sustainability principles in workplaces.
• Promote proactive plans and understanding of those actions needed to sustain, improve and restore the environment.
• Share speciality and have interactions with other disciplines like engineers, chemists, biologists and the like for the improvement of environmental understanding and practices.
• Encouraging environmental enhancement is also your duty.
• Try to look for solutions that are compatible with health and environmental protection. You should also investigate new technologies and solutions for its welfare.

Include environment sustainability in engineering work:  

• Perform professional duties as much as you can as per the emerging principles of sustainability and the highest criteria of environmental protection. Your every project must include the responsibility of environmental protection and sustainability.
• Take into account the individual and cumulative social, economic and environmental impacts, also including indirect and long-term impacts.
• Make sure that you incorporate environmental protection, socio-economic and resource sustainability points from the beginning stages of project design or policy development.
• Utilize responsible practices to ensure environmental protection and the wise use of resources as expected from an APEGS You should adopt policies, practices and design goals paying attention to efficiency, conservation of energy and materials and waste minimization.
• Evaluate and advise alternative concepts, methods, designs where risks can be found. You also need to determine, if necessary, the impact range coming from an activity, policy and product.

You must be aware of the environmental issues and their solutions:

• Have and maintain the expected level of knowledge of environmental issues along with their field of practice. You should also be aware of the regulations, guidelines, codes and environmentally sound practices.
• Be aware of the societal targets to protect the environment and maintain its sustainability. Moreover, you also need to know the major issues related to fulfilling these goals as a responsible APEGS engineering professional.
• Have an idea of the dependence of the coming generations on ecosystems and the limited capacity of the environment in terms of resource use and assimilating impacts.
• Identify the importance of early, active and multi-disciplinary (biologists, engineers, chemists and so on) role in the understanding, anticipation and handling of environmental issues.
• Recognize the importance of consultative processes to deal with complicated environmental issues.
• Have a clear idea of the extent to which activities within a practice field impact the health and the public and the environmental condition.