Welcome to the first issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering (IJSE) in 2019, the year in which we enter our twelfth year of publication. We are very excited to observe the constant growth in the number of annual submissions; however, the ever-increasing range of subject areas in these submissions continues to provide considerable challenges in identifying appropriate reviewers who are willing to accept our invitation to review the papers in an appropriate time frame.
We are grateful to our authors for their patience during the reviewing process and to our reviewers for submitting their reviews on time and are continuing our efforts for improving the efficiency of this process. In this context, we will be asking authors to clearly indicate in their manuscripts where reviewers’ and editorial comments have been taken into consideration so that the manuscripts will receive an editorial decision after the second review. However, we are still unable to offer a special fast-track reviewing for those authors who are in need of publication as part of their fulfilment of postgraduate study requisites. We are also unable to forward manuscripts that are suffering from poor English or formatting errors to our Production Team at Taylor & Francis.
To showcase the diverse range of sustainability publications in IJSE, in this issue we present seven research papers focusing on indicators for assessing sustainability enhancement and supporting factors for improved product remanufacturing as well as cleaner production approaches through wastewater management and utilisation of solar energy.
The first article in this issue by Mesaa et al. presents a methodology, entitled Relative Assessment of Indicators in Sustainability Enhancement (RAISE) to support the decision-making process when comparing different manufacturing scenarios. A guitar capo, manufactured in polymeric material, is used as a case study to demonstrate the application of RAISE.
The second paper by Li et al. explores the impact of government subsidy and tax policies on the competitive decision-making within a remanufacturing supply chain. The next paper by Shao et al. continues the focus on remanufacturing by investigating the impact of various market structures based on whether the remanufactured products are sold by the original retailer or directly by the remanufacturer.
The fourth paper by Capuzzi et al. explores the effect of the quantity of salt on the metal recovery within rotary and crucible furnaces, by melting several types of scrap under a mixture of NaCl-KCl-Na3AlF6 salts. These experiments have shown that the rate of metal recovery increases with the amount of salt content in both furnaces. In the next paper, Ahmad and Ghufran provide an innovative approach for treating palm oil mill effluent (POME) from open pond and closed anaerobic sludge reactor for generation of green energy in the form of biogas containing methane.
The sixth paper in this issue by Ayodele et al. describes a study on the environmental and economic benefits of providing water supply using solar powered pumps for abattoirs in Ibadan – Nigeria. This issue of the IJSE concludes with a paper by Sherwani et al. which provides an Indian perspective on the sustainability of different solar photovoltaic electricity generating systems based upon generated electrical output, life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and life cycle cost of electricity generated per kWh.