EDITORIAL: Engineering Sustainability

Watching a junked school bus being fed into a mammoth hammer mill, which loudly pummeled the bus into fragments of metal, rubber, and plastic, was a sight I'll always remember. I was visiting Huron Valley Metals, a major scrapyard and recycling facility near Detroit, during reporting for an article on automotive recycling. Seeing that big yellow bus chomped up, with practically 100% of its steel, iron and aluminum content collected for reuse, made clear to me the importance of recyclability and materials choice in product design.

But a glance at the refuse and recycling containers awaiting curbside pickup in my small town - all headed for the landfill - reveals how little the public knows, and cares, about product end-use. A lack of ready markets plays a role in what currently gets tossed. So does a hodgepodge infrastructure with myriad definitions and rules. Partly as a result, the U.S. plastics recycling rate is just 5%, according to the Dept. of Energy. Effective materials recycling gets far less attention than tailpipe emissions but is equally deserving of industry focus.