The resolution of today's environmental problems requires a fundamental knowledge of mass transfer, reaction engineering, and separation processes. These technical areas are the foundation of the chemical engineering curriculum. Chemical engineers will thus play an integral role in protecting the environment in the 21st century. However, environmental engineering is commonly housed in civil engineering, where it grew out of sewage treatment, wastewater treatment, and landfill efforts. The future of environmental engineering, and major developments in the field, lies in the realm of chemical engineering. The development of an Environmental Chemical Engineering Laboratory (ECEL) is one step in a departmental initiative to provide undergraduate chemical engineering students with a thorough grounding in the principles of environmental engineering. Within the ECEL, a series of waste treatment processes are investigated. With the media in which the waste is located as an organizing tool, this project is primarily concerned with experiments investigating air pollution control, wastewater treatment, and hazardous waste redemption. As a result, the experiments are demonstration and performance of an automotive catalytic converter, supercritical fluid extraction of solid waste, chemical oxidation of process wastewater, adsorption of aqueous contaminants onto activated carbon, and reverse osmosis for the recovery of low-concentration hazardous waste. Each of these experiments not only illustrate environmental applications, but are based on the fundamental principles of chemical engineering. Taken together, this group of experiments represent the synergy of chemical and environmental engineering. *
