What Is an Engineer

What is an engineer?

Engineer is the solution developer for technical problems to make a progress to the society with the professional engineering knowledge. The ultimate goal of engineer is to provide mankind a better living environment. The earth is being over populated gradually. Limited resources restrict the provision of basic need to all the population. Thus, as engineers play an important role in society, they have responsibility and obligations to the society especially to the environmental.

Natural resources can be divided into renewable and non-renewable resources. Renewable sources are naturally available in the environment, such as timber, wind, solar, tidal etc. Non-renewable sources also available in the environment with limited supply and need thousands of years to recover which include metal, coal, oil, natural gas and so on. Engineering projects require a considerable amount of natural resources, for instance steel, oil etc. in each year it consume 3 billion tons of resources. (Masud, Akhtaruzzaman, Bari &Anwar, 2011). The using up of the major resources will hinder the progress of all the engineering projects.

Engineers have to make the fullest use of the natural resources without any wastage in order to maximize the use of sources and minimize the loss of non-regenerative substances. Engineers should also lower the reliance of non-renewable sources replaced by renewable sources in the lon-run. There has been a trend of integration of renewable sources in the construction projects, like replacing the steel with hard wood which are having similar density, and having solar panel and wind turbine within the buildings and construction projects.

Furthermore, engineers are encouraged to utilize recycled materials. Steel from demolished structure can be collected and refined while blocks made from recycled glass containers have been used for pavement. Avoiding buying materials from overseas or distant location would be a wise...