Plastics are increasingly a preferred material choice in designing and developing complex, consumer products, such as automobiles, because they are mouldable, lightweight, and are often perceived to be highly recyclable materials. However, actually recycling the heterogeneous plastics used in such durable items is challenging, and presents very different scenarios to how simple products, such as water bottles, are recovered via curbside or container recycling initiatives. While the technology exists to recycle plastics, their feasibility to do so from high level consumer or industrial applications is bounded by technological and economical restraints. Obstacles include the lack of market for recyclates, and the lack of cost efficient recovery infrastructures or processes. Furthermore, there is a knowledge gap between manufacturers, consumers, and end-of-life facility operators. For these reasons, end-of-life plastics are more likely to end up down-cycled, or as shredder residue and then landfilled. This paper reviews these challenges and several alternatives to recycling plastics in order to broaden the mindset surrounding plastics recycling to improve their sustainability. The paper focuses on the automotive sector for examples, but discussion can be applied to a wide range of plastic components from similarly complex products.

Much of the focus on sustainable infrastructure has concentrated on buildings and construction processes. To advance this thinking for other civil infrastructure systems (CIS), this paper outlines a framework that uses a set of proposed indicators to measure the sustainability of chosen infrastructure options and help select the preferred alternative in a multiobjective decision approach. Physically implementing "sustainable infrastructure" involves three life stages for any project: preproject planning, project implementation, and ongoing operations. It is critical to evaluate the sustainability of chosen options in each of these life stages. This research develops two categories of indicators, mandatory screening indicators (MSI) and judgment indicators (JI), and a multilayer approach for incorporating these indicators. A normalization procedure has been adapted to work within the framework to help compare alternatives across a range of indicators and different orders of data magnitude. A hypothetical example using a transmission line corridor is presented to illustrate how the framework can be applied.Key words: indicators, infrastructure, sustainable, environment, decision making, alternatives.

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The state of brownfield remediation and rehabilitation approaches continues to advance significantly, particularly with respect to the types of brownfield technologies available for assessing and treating contaminants. However, largely absent is a structured means for integrating the objectives of multiple stakeholders (e.g., municipality, developer, regulator, community) comprehensively by using a classifica-