Welcome to the final issue of 2012. With this issue, we have successfully completed our fifth year in publication, and, once again, we would like to record our gratitude for the support provided to the Journal by our authors and reviewers. We would also like to record our thanks to the administrative staff at Loughborough University and Taylor & Francis for their hard work through the year and their continued support.
In this issue, we present seven papers on subjects that range from design through manufacture to civil engineering and education for sustainable engineering. The first paper, by Tang Tang and Tracy Bhamra, describes how design for sustainable behaviour can be used to promote behavioural change that enables a product to be used with less impact on the environment. Using a domestic fridge as an example, the authors provide a case study that shows how consumer involvement can support successful design innovation. This is followed by a paper by Ran Bhamra which addresses the issue of the sustainability imperative and its influence on outsourcing practice. Given that a business cannot operate in a truly sustainable manner unless its inputs have been produced by environmentally responsible suppliers, it seems surprising that the author's research identified that almost a third of respondents did not consider sustainability when making their outsourcing decisions. In the third paper, Katsamaki and Bilalis apply lean thinking methodology to guide redesign propositions for end-of-life (EOL) electrical and electronic products. They have sought to overcome the often experienced problem of limited information, due to the delayed retrieval of products, by pre-selection of the optimal EOL strategy and by evaluating the outcome of that strategy. Also concerned with EOL products, Gu Qiaolun and Gao Tiegang have studied two competitive closed-loop supply chains from the perspective of return product collection cost and considered how the costs and benefits to each participant in the process promote the collection and return of used products. The authors provide a numerical example to illustrate their model in action.
Moving to the theme of civil engineering, we present a paper by Bhowmick et al. which reports an investigation to reduce rutting in road (pavement) surfaces. This problem is caused by heavy vehicles and is especially pronounced at higher ambient temperature when asphalt stiffness is at its lowest. The authors propose the use of a conductive spreader layer below the pavement combined with water cooling pipes to improve pavement stiffness. We follow with the sixth paper that addresses dual-fuel operation in a diesel engine. In this paper, Banapurmath et al. compare the performance, combustion and emission characteristics of a dual-fuel system based on combinations of producer gas and either Honge- or Jatropha-based biodiesels. The authors provide recommendations for the best fuel combination and carburettor design. Finally, we present a paper with an educational theme in which Waheed et al. describe a fuzzy-based multi-criteria decision-making model that enables comparison between universities based on sustainability indicators and compares the final ranking for selected Canadian universities.