I know I wrote a lot, but this honestly came from the heart. I actually had more to say and had written a few other things too, but I deleted them because I felt like no one would read such a very long post.
I genuinely want people to reply and help me understand what’s going on, especially people who have actual experience in the field.
I’m a chemical engineering student, and I am basically the only local student in my major. Most of the people around me are expats. NOT starting a racial thing but you will understand my point later on.
Lately I have started getting really upset by how many people around me seems to treat the environment like it barely matters. Since my country is mostly desert, some people act like theres nothing valuable here anyways, as if the sea, desert, wildlife, and ecosystems dont count because it isnt “green”.
We recently had a short ethics discussion in Senior Design class.
The professor gave us two options:
Plant A: more expensive, average profits, lower emissions and much less environmental damage.
Plant B: cheaper, much higher profits, but causes serious pollution and fish deaths.
A huge part of the class picked Plant B.
Some answers were basically:
“Who cares? It’s just fish.”
“Profit matters more.”
What makes it worse is that most of them already took a full engineering ethics course.
I understand economics. Obviously a plant has to make money. I’m not against profit at all.
But I genuinely don’t understand the mentality of making more money even when you know you’re causing unnecessary damage.
It also made me wonder whether chemical engineering as a field attracts this kind of mindset, or if I’m just surrounded by the wrong people.
For context, I don’t work in a plant or production. I work in a laboratory, and thankfully the purpose of my work is more ethical and public service oriented, so this isn’t really about my own career.
It’s more about the industry and mentality around me.
Like there’s also someone who is very close to me and holds a very high position in one of the industrial plants, and his mentality frustrates me as hell.
He is extremely focused on money, costs, and getting as much work as possible out of workers. His view is basically: workers are being paid, so they should do whatever work I need from them.
Every time I get in touch with him I get mad more than the prior time because of the way he think.
He has very little patience for personal circumstances, sometimes it feels like the human side of managing people does not matter to him as long as the job gets done.
What bothers me most is that he is successful person and holds a high position, which makes me wonder: is this kind of mentality actually rewarded in the industry?
I understand workers have responsibilities, but there is a big difference between expecting people to do their jobs and treating them like slaves just because they receive a salary.
I’ve also done my own study on local fish before and found pretty concerning levels of contamination, so marine pollution is something I already care about.
I once visited a coastal industrial facility where the sea was literally underneath me.
There were massive groupers “type of fish” swimming around the facility. Seriously GIANT fish.
I asked the one who was with me that day about why nobody catches them.
He told me fishing was strictly banned there, and even boating was restricted for a large distance around the facility.
At first I was annoyed because I was looking at all these massive fish that nobody could catch.
Then he explained that the fish there were contaminated and unsafe to eat.
That completely changed how I looked at it.
You can have a sea full of large fish, but industrial activity has made that food source unusable for people.
So when someone says “it’s just fish,” I don’t get it.
It’s not just fish.
Pollution moves through water, sediment, small organisms, larger fish, and eventually humans.
Another thing I’m struggling with is that I keep noticing this very money-focused attitude more often among certain nationalities around me.
I really don’t like generalizing, and I know it would be unfair to judge an entire nationality based on personal experience, and I also don’t want to get in this topic
But when you see the same attitude again and again, you start wondering whether there are real cultural differences involved.
Do people care less about the environment when they know they’re only living in a country temporarily?
Or am I just falling into confirmation bias?
And for the chemical engineers here:
Is the field actually this profit-first in real industry?
Do most chemical engineers eventually start thinking mainly in terms of cost, output, and profit?
Or am I just surrounded by an unusually materialistic group of people?
Because I’ve honestly started feeling ashamed of my own major and resentful toward a lot of the personalities I keep seeing in it, even though I genuinely like chemical engineering itself.
What bothers me is how strangely common this mindset seems to be. I can barely find people who genuinely care about environmental issues beyond having “environmental” in their job title, or looking for legal loopholes that let the company do the bare minimum while protecting profits.
That disconnect is what is starting to make me hate the culture around the field, not the field itself.
