Materials and Sustainability: Building a Circular Future

This book examines sustainable manufacturing, from the extraction of materials to processing, use, and disposal, and argues that significant changes in all of the above are needed for the world to progress toward a more circular economy.

Materials and processing methods are usually chosen with performance as the key metric. Why has our society embraced plastics? Because they work. In most cases, they are lighter, easier to manufacture, and less expensive than the metal, wood, glass, or stone...