16-Civ-A3 Elementary Environmental Engineering · May 2018
Question 3 of 7: Environmental Impact Assessment, Sustainable Development and Ethics
Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)
Notes on this paper
Paper format. National Exams, May 2018 — 16-Civ-A3 Elementary Environmental Engineering. Three hours; closed book with one candidate-prepared 8½ × 11 double-sided aid sheet; approved Casio or Sharp calculator only. Seven problems are printed, each worth 20 marks, and any five constitute a complete paper (maximum 100 marks). All seven are solved here, because the set is intended as a study resource rather than an exam script. Section marks are shown in brackets at the left margin of each question and are reproduced from the final-page Marking Scheme.
Reference texts.
Davis, M.L. & Cornwell, D.A., Introduction to Environmental Engineering, 5th ed., McGraw-Hill — material and energy balances, reactor kinetics, hardness, disinfection, water and wastewater unit processes.
Masters, G.M. & Ela, W.P., Introduction to Environmental Engineering and Science, 3rd ed., Pearson — mass/energy balances on power plants, air-emission estimation, growth–pollution linkages.
Metcalf & Eddy / AECOM, Wastewater Engineering: Treatment and Resource Recovery, 5th ed., McGraw-Hill — wastewater unit processes and plant upgrading.
Crittenden, J.C. et al. (MWH), Water Treatment: Principles and Design, 3rd ed., Wiley — coagulation/flocculation, filtration, membranes, adsorption, disinfection.
Engineers Canada / EGBC Code of Ethics; Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) and the Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality (GCDWQ), Health Canada — professional duty and water-quality benchmarks.
Check: Problem 4(ii) quotes a rate constant as “20 dm6/mol2” with no time unit, and states the fundamental reaction 2A + B ⇌ C. It is solved as a forward-rate second-in-A/first-in-B rate law with $k=20\ \text{dm}^{6}\,\text{mol}^{-2}\,\text{s}^{-1}$ (the only reading that makes $-r_A=k\,C_A^{2}C_B$ dimensionally a rate); the time unit is taken as seconds per NOTE 1. Because no feed flow rate is supplied, the well-posed deliverable is the flow-independent space-time $\tau$ (with $V=\tau\,v_0$ for any stated feed basis), not an absolute volume.
Question 3: Environmental Impact Assessment, Sustainable Development and Ethics (20 marks)
Part (i) — EIA to reduce damage and life-cycle cost of the coal mine (6 marks)
An EIA applied early (at the creation stage) screens and scopes the project, characterises baseline conditions in the receiving watershed, predicts impacts on the crab fishery, and identifies mitigation and monitoring before commitments are locked in. For a coal mine draining toward a valuable crab-fishing region the dominant pathways are acid-rock drainage / metal leaching, sediment release, and altered flow. By requiring alternatives analysis, mitigation (progressive reclamation, water treatment, sediment control, benthic and water-quality monitoring) and a bonded closure/reclamation plan up front, the EIA reduces environmental damage to the fishery and reduces life-cycle cost: designing out acid drainage and planning closure during creation is far cheaper than remediating a legacy site, treating water in perpetuity, or compensating a collapsed fishery after the fact. The EIA therefore internalises long-term costs into the design decision.
Part (ii) — Three strategies achieving two sustainable-development goals (7 marks)
Target goals (UN SDGs): SDG 7 — Affordable and Clean Energy and SDG 13 — Climate Action. A green-energy production strategy advances both through the strategies below.
Three green-energy strategies mapped to two sustainable-development goals
Strategy
SDG 7 (clean energy) contribution
SDG 13 (climate action) contribution
1. Displace fossil generation with renewables (wind, solar, hydro)
Adds affordable, low-marginal-cost generation and diversifies supply.
Directly avoids CO2 from coal/gas combustion — the largest single lever.
2. Energy efficiency and demand management (retrofits, high-efficiency motors, smart grid)
Delivers the same service with less generation — the cheapest “source”.
Every avoided kWh avoids the associated emissions and defers new capacity.
Extends clean electricity to heating and transport reliably.
Shifts fossil end-uses onto a decarbonising grid, compounding the emission cut.
Part (iii) — Ethical actions of the reviewing engineer (7 marks)
The review has uncovered a technically deficient and discriminatory EIA. The three duties resolve as follows.
(a) Faithful agent/trustee. The engineer owes BAAES (the client) a competent, honest review — which means reporting the deficiencies to the client in writing, not concealing them. Being a faithful agent does not mean shielding the client from unwelcome findings; it means giving the client the accurate professional advice it retained the engineer to provide, and recommending the flawed EIA be corrected (proper alternatives analysis, unbiased site scoring, honest hazard/cost accounting) before any permit application proceeds.
(b) Paramountcy of public safety, health and welfare. This duty overrides the client’s commercial interest. The under-estimated hazards to a low-income minority community and the racially biased siting are matters of public welfare and environmental justice; the engineer must ensure they are not carried forward into a federal permit. If the client refuses to correct the EIA, the paramountcy duty requires the engineer to decline to certify or endorse it and, where the public is endangered, to notify the appropriate regulator.
(c) Objective and truthful public statements. The engineer must not sign, endorse or allow the misleading EIA to be issued as truthful, and any public or regulatory statement the engineer makes must objectively reflect the true findings, including the deficiencies and the uncertainty. Silence that lets a false document stand would breach this duty.
The professionally correct course: document the findings, advise the client to fix the EIA, refuse to certify a biased/deficient assessment, escalate to the regulator if public welfare so requires, and keep all statements truthful throughout — the paramountcy of public welfare governs where the duties conflict.
