Sustainable materials with both eyes open

This book makes exhilarating, fascinating, and forward-looking reading for everyone interested in sustainability. Allwood and Cullen (both, Cambridge, UK), following many ideas put forward by Mike Ashby (Cambridge), address sustainability (mostly in terms of CO^D[2 production) for material production/use of five of the commonest engineered materials: steel, aluminum, cement, plastic, and paper. They emphasize the first two since they are the most widely used materials sustaining the world's material culture, and introduce two points of view. The "one-eye-open" approach emphasizes efficiency/optimization in material production; they show that this is a limiting view as most production routes are more/less optimized. The "both-eyes-open" approach, besides optimized production, seeks alternative routes to sustainability: optimizing design, reducing yield losses, using scrap "losses" in other applications, reusing components, and designing products for longer usable lifetimes. The conclusion offers directions for a sustainable future in terms of business, policy, and individual approaches. The layperson's introduction to the required materials science and the one-page preface are gems. A discussion of other energy-hogging CO^D[2-producing materials might have been useful, but for the five materials addressed, the authors convincingly make the case that sustainability must focus on both optimized material production and optimal design/use. Summing Up: Essential. All students, engineers, managers, policy makers, and general readers interested in sustainability. J. Lambropoulos University of Rochester