Many engineering disciplines engage in green engineering. This includes sustainable design, life cycle analysis (LCA), pollution prevention, design for the environment (DfE), design for disassembly (DfD), and design for recycling (DfR).  As such, green engineering is a subset of sustainable engineering.
Green engineering involves four basic approaches to improve processes and products to make them more efficient from an environmental standpoint.
# Waste reduction;
# Materials management;
# Pollution prevention; and,
# Product enhancement.
Green engineering approaches design from a systematic perspective which integrates numerous professional disciplines. In addition to all engineering disciplines, green engineering includes land use planning, architecture, landscape architecture, and other design fields, as well as the social sciences(e.g. to determine how various groups of people use products and services. Green engineers are concerned with space, the sense of place, viewing the site map as a set of fluxes across the boundary, and considering the combinations of these systems over larger regions, e.g. urban areas. 
The life cycle analysis is an important green engineering tool, which provides a holistic view of the entirety of a product, process or activity, encompassing raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, use, maintenance, recycling, and final disposal. Assessing its life cycle should yield a complete picture of the product. The first step in a life cycle assessment is to gather data on the flow of a material through an identifiable society. Once the quantities of various components of such a flow are known, the important functions and impacts of each step in the production, manufacture, use, and recovery/disposal are estimated. In sustainable design, engineers must optimize for variables that give the best performance in temporal frames.
The system approach employed in green engineering is similar to value engineering (VE). Daniel A. Vallero has compared green engineering to be a form of VE because both systems require that all elements and linkages within the overall project be considered to enhance the value of the project. Every component and step of the system must be challenged. Ascertaining overall value is determined not only be a project's cost-effectiveness, but other values, including environmental and public health factors. Thus, the broader sense of VE is compatible with and can be identical to green engineering, since VE is aimed at effectiveness, not just efficiency, i.e. a project is designed to achieve multiple objectives, without sacrificing any important values. Efficiency is an engineering and thermodynamic term for the ratio of an input to an output of energy and mass within a system. As the ratio approaches 100%, the system becomes more efficient. Effectiveness requires that efficiencies be met for each component, but also that the integration of components lead to an effective, multiple value-based design.
Green engineering is also a type of concurrent engineering, since tasks must be parallelized to achieve multiple design objectives.