Sustainability competency is an essential component in engineering education and engineers with multiple competencies are in demand globally. Engineers are important players in adapting the latest technology sustainably. Undergraduate students, who are future professionals, can use engineering education for development of the modern sustainable world and they must acquire such skills. They need to be prepared to work in teams and think critically to solve complex problems with sustainability principles in mind. Cognitive, affective, and behavioral competencies are highly needed in skilled professionals and it is not easy to develop them through traditional teaching methods such as lecturing. Activity based learning is an effective approach for developing these competencies. This paper reports an effort to create awareness about sustainability in engineering education by undertaking multiple activities (carbon footprint, energy audit , mind mapping, sustainable designing etc. ) for first year engineering students at an autonomous Engineering College in Maharashtra under Project Based Learning course (PBL). From the assessment of the activities, it was clearly demonstrated that students developed good understanding of sustainability and actively participated in all the activities and suggested various interesting measures to reduce carbon footprint and electrical consumption. They also used the sustainability principles in designing and implementation in their PBL projects at the end of the semester. Thus, PBL can be considered as a practical and innovative pedagogy to effectively support core values of sustainability such as participative learning, critical reflection, systemic thinking, and creativity.