DIMENSIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract

Literature reveals definitions, themes and descriptions of sustainability in many complex shapes and sizes some ranging from strategy, framework, phrases, concepts, indexes, indictors, weak, strong, externality, internally and criterion, Hence, presenting an immense diversity of opinion, with confusion to its literal implementation. It exposes “sustainability” as function to transdisciplinary variables which are underlined in three common themes, social, economic, technological and ecological. Many questions are raised than answers, is it a utopian state or pseudo ideal process? Where do the complex issues of sustainability leave us engineers? The objective of this paper was to define the bounds of sustainability and to investigate a fourth dimension called “technology” in order to form a methodology to quantify.