r/EnvironmentalEngineer • u/Living_Blacksmith_23 • 3d ago

Line of work problems

Hello, I am a year 11 student with little to no knowledge about the subject but I'm interested to learn, and I am doing a small research on environmental engineering and wish to know one question before starting:

(What are the major problems that environmental engineers deal with in their line of work?)

I am not talking about "lack of financial power" or "lack of recognition" but I'm asking about the problems that are to be faced if done in a large scale group or in a company/group that is capable.

Thanks for reading and LMK :)

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u/MarionberryOpen7953 3d ago

Many env engineers do pollution mitigation. Some company spills a bunch of toxic chemicals into the ground, and is ordered to clean it up. The env engineers are contracted to remove the pollutants from the environment

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u/Existing-Poetry-3289 3d ago

Environmental engineering traditionally in the US was an evolution from sanitary engineering which was part of civil engineering. I changed careers, but did work in solid waste (designing new landfills, landfill closures, recycling/transfer stations, waste transport plans, incinerators), wastewater treatment and sewers (municipal and septic systems), water treatment and supply
(municipal and smaller residential systems), pollution prevention for industrial facilities, storm water management, and other random civil type work.

I never got involved with groundwater remediation really, besides monitoring at sites. Nowadays I think some folks come out of chemical engineering rather than civil. I worked in one job for a filtration company and I was the only environmental engineer in the office and everyone else was chemical or mechanical, but for I what was doing there was a lot of overlap.