Editorial

In this issue we have published papers on a variety of subjects which cover supply chain issues, sustainable design and innovation issues, and optimisation activities in product recovery applications. In addition, we have also included, as a short communication, the results from a Delphi project that considered the essential requirements for incorporating the principles of sustainable development in engineering education.

The planning for the forthcoming issues in 2009 has been finalised with two special issues now confirmed. In addition to the special issue on ‘Materials and Sustainable Engineering’, for which the ‘call for papers’ was published in issue 3 (and also included in this issue), we shall be publishing a selection of papers that were presented at the environmental and sustainability track of the 18th International Conference on ‘Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing’ which was held in June 2008 in Sweden. This will be a strategy that we aim to continue beyond 2009 and therefore would like to invite contributions and suggestions for our future special issues from those conference organisers and engineers who wish to act as Special Issue Editors.

We are confident that we can build upon the successful launch of the Journal and would like to encourage more authors to submit papers to help us to meet our principal objective of being truly representative of the engineering profession, in its broadest sense, and to be international in our outreach. Finally, all of the staff associated with the Journal wish to express their gratitude to authors, editorial board members and reviewers for their help and support during this first year of operation. We have published a list of our reviewers, for papers and books, in this issue as a public acknowledgement for their work.