When considering the intense demand for resources that drive our economies and support life on the planet, we can define five distinct global reservoirs that all societies require: air, water, soil, sediment (minerals), and energy. Each of these reservoirs has limited extent, requires recharging and maintenance, and shows interconnectedness at multiple levels. Correspondingly, each of these reserves is being depleted at an unsustainable rate. The increased demand for reservoir access (particularly for water and energy reserves) has placed enormous pressures on government and industries to develop technological advancements that answer the call for sustainable technologies to maintain each of these reservoirs. It is our goal in environmental technology to assess those reservoirs, determining the advanced tools required to maintain each both on a personal and industrial scale.

Over the next twenty years and beyond, science education will face challenges in terms of an increasingly competitive scientific workforce from developing countries, as well as intensive demands on global environmental resources. As other countries make the transition toward renewable energy and clean air-/water-based economies by subsidizing those industries, the playing field for environmental technologies and the science that underscores them changes. Education in environmental technology is the frontier that will provide students with job opportunities and a competitive edge in research.