This paper examines the evolving role of chemical engineering education in balancing process and product design to address sustainability challenges. Chemical engineering education has traditionally emphasized process design and operation, culminating in capstone plant design projects. In recent decades, however, chemical product design has emerged as an important complementary pathway, offering opportunities to address sustainability challenges more holistically. With the advent of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs), the discipline is increasingly being called upon to integrate sustainability principles into both process and product contexts. This paper builds on earlier work using the CDIO Framework to embed sustainability mindset development in chemical engineering curricula, extending the model to a “double helix” dual pathway of process and product design. The paper demonstrates how integrated learning experiences can be designed using GenAI and systematically structured to cultivate key competencies for sustainability. A revised set of eight competencies, aligned with the European GreenComp framework, is proposed to strengthen connections to sustainability mindset principles and address prior gaps such as problem framing. Systems thinking and values thinking are identified as the anchor competencies, one for each strand of the “double helix” pathway that intertwines analytical and ethical dimensions of sustainability learning. This pairing ensures that students not only grasp systemic complexity but also internalize fairness, responsibility, and personal agency. This paper shares a possible double helix for chemical engineering, with integrated learning experiences that progressively expose students to sustainability issues of increasing complexity, supported by faculty oversight. The approach is equally applicable to programs with only process pathways or beyond chemical engineering, offering a reproducible model for embedding sustainability mindset across disciplines. Lastly, the paper discusses the advantages and limitations of the double helix model, and the need to continue keeping abreast with technological development given the dynamic nature of sustainable development.
