Estoy tratando de agregar una variable de entorno para un objeto ProcessBuilder, pero luego cuando invoco esa nueva variable en ProcessBuilder, aparece un error. Así es como construyo el Proceso.

public class OTU
{
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
        ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder();
        Map<String, String> env = pb.environment();
        //set environment variable u
        env.put("u", "util/");

        pb.command("echo $u");
        Process p = pb.start();
        String output = loadStream(p.getInputStream());
        String error  = loadStream(p.getErrorStream());
        int rc = p.waitFor();
        System.out.println("Process ended with rc=" + rc);
        System.out.println("\nStandard Output:\n");
        System.out.println(output);
        System.out.println("\nStandard Error:\n");
        System.out.println(error);
    }

    private static String loadStream(InputStream s) throws Exception
    {
        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(s));
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        String line;
        while((line=br.readLine()) != null)
            sb.append(line).append("\n");
        return sb.toString();
    }
}

Me sale el error

Exception in thread "main" java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "$u": java.io.IOException: error=2, No such file or directory
    at java.lang.ProcessBuilder.start(ProcessBuilder.java:475)
    at ca.utoronto.siseq_1_2.OTU.main(OTU.java:22)
Caused by: java.io.IOException: java.io.IOException: error=2, No such file or directory
    at java.lang.UNIXProcess.<init>(UNIXProcess.java:164)
    at java.lang.ProcessImpl.start(ProcessImpl.java:81)
    at java.lang.ProcessBuilder.start(ProcessBuilder.java:468)
    ... 1 more

No entiendo por qué recibo el error si acabo de configurar la variable para este proceso. Por favor, ayúdeme a configurar la variable env para poder usarla en ProcessBuilder.