From Effi ciency to Sustainability. Training responsible engineers in the new educational scene

Abstract

• Terms like Sustainable Development and 
Professional Business Ethics are more and 
more often used in Engineering professional 
exercise. The Professional Associations as 
regulatory organisms of the profession have 
to take care that the professional activity 
is made involving no detrimental effect 
to the natural and social environment, 
thus meeting the needs of the present 
without compromising the ability of future 
generations.
In the article the relevancy of including 
transversal ethical and social competences 
in the engineering studies has been 
highlighted. For this task, the authors 
describe their experience in the subject of 
extractive metallurgy, developed in the 
Industrial Engineering School of Badajoz.
Achieving a proper way of approaching 
these contents requires a very fl uid relation 
university–business activities. In the 
same way, based on these fi rst studies, 
interuniversity and interdisciplinary working 
networks might be created in order to 
study the optimal way for developing these 
competences.