Editorial

Materials are at the very heart of sustainable engineering. They are the basis of every artefact and product and the equipment required in their production. The extraction of raw materials and their processing to produce materials and products for engineering applications consumes energy and generates waste and pollution, and has a carbon and water footprint. Improving the efficiency with which materials are processed and used has enormous potential for reducing environmental impacts and for the promotion of sustainable engineering practice. In this Special Issue on Materials and Sustainable Engineering, we have selected eight papers that represent the diverse range of materials and their applications within a sustainable engineering environment. This issue also contains five book reviews, three of which directly complement the theme of this Special Issue.

In the first paper, Bakker et al. consider the role of materials in the context of design concepts such as ‘cradle-to-cradle’ and life-cycle assessment, and discuss the environmental and business validity of such concepts. Life-cycle assessment is used by Menzies and Roderick to analyse the carbon and energy use embodied in the materials used to produce a solar thermal collector. The replacement of a glass fibre by a natural fibre is the theme of the paper by Foulk and his co-authors. The authors consider the characteristics that flax fibres must demonstrate in order that they might be used as a renewable and sustainable alternative to glass fibres in composite production.

The theme of waste reduction is addressed in several papers. In the paper by Soyama and Sekine, cavitation peening is proposed as an alternative to shot peening for surface treatment of gears to improve their fatigue resistance. This process avoids the waste associated with the breakdown of the shot material used in peening. Studds and Miller consider a very different approach to waste reduction. They consider the beneficial reuse of material dredged from canals. By analysing the dredged material, they have found it possible to classify it as non-hazardous, thus opening the way to use it for canal stabilisation.

The final three papers address materials used in the built environment. The paper by Ball and Allen considers the load-dependent deformation and shrinkage in lime mortars and identifies a relationship between specimen dimensions and relative humidity. The paper by Balo et al. addresses the use of waste material, fly ash and a binder derived from palm oil, a renewable resource to produce insulating building materials. In the final paper, de Brito looks specifically at the abrasion resistance of concrete made using recycled aggregates, finding that there is certainly no impairment of the characteristic and that there is some evidence of an improvement.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Jolly

Guest Editors