Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen's Sustainable Materials -
with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and
Equipment - Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material is
a companion volume to Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air,
one of the best books on science, technology and the environment
I've ever read. We review a lot of popular science books around
here, but Sustainable Materials (like Sustainable Energy) is a
popular engineering text, a rare and wonderful kind of book.
Sustainable Materials is an engineer's audit of the materials
that our world is made of, the processes by which those
materials are extracted, refined, used, recycled and disposed
of, and the theoretical and practical efficiencies that we
could, as a society, realize. Allwood and Cullen write about
engineering with the elegance of the best pop-science writers --
say, James Gleick or Rebecca Skloot -- but while science is
never far from their work, their focus is on engineering. They
render lucid and comprehensible th