The concept of “sustainable development” implies that the environmental externalities unavoidably generated by human activities be reduced to a minimum: In fact, the very definition of “sustainability” leads—as it will be briefly discussed in the paper—to a physically measurable...

Twenty-five years ago, Gaggioli, Sama and Qian published a series of 10 “second law guidelines” for design and process engineers, nicknamed at that time “the Gaggioli-Sama rules”. These guidelines, some of them previously published by Sama between 1980 and 1983, are a compilation of...