This volume compiles topics from the REWAS 2013 symposium at the TMS Annual Meeting, focusing on different aspects of sustainability. It discusses how to realize sustainability in such areas as transportation, the built environment, electrical and electronic equipment and infrastructure, energy production, and water systems. Enabling sustainability topics include the use of metals and materials processing, recycling and recovery, as well as process design and modeling. The book focuses on understanding sustainability through life cycle management and analysis, systems modeling and design, and education and consumer awareness.

Patients as Policy Actors offers groundbreaking accounts of one of the health field's most important developments of the last fifty years--the rise of more consciously patient-centered care and policymaking. The authors in this volume illustrate, from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the unexpected ways that patients can matter as both agents and objects of health care policy yet nonetheless too often remain silent, silenced, misrepresented, or ignored. The volume concludes with a unique epilogue outlining principles for more effectively integrating patient perspectives into a pluralistic conception of policy-making. With the recent enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, patients' and consumers' roles in American health care require more than ever the careful analysis and attention exemplified by this innovative volume.

Patients as Policy Actors offers groundbreaking accounts of one of the health field's most important developments of the last fifty years--the rise of more consciously patient-centred care and policymaking. The authors in this volume illustrate, from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the unexpected ways that patients can matter as both agents and objects of health care policy yet nonetheless too often remain silent, silenced, misrepresented, or ignored. The volume concludes with a unique epilogue outlining principles for more effectively integrating patient perspectives into a pluralistic conception of policy-making. With the recent enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, patients' and consumers' roles in American health care require more than ever the careful analysis and attention exemplified by this innovative volume.

In the early 1980s, as America stood at a crossroads - between New Deal liberalism and the conservatism of 'the Reagan Revolution' - so too did American medicine and health care. Engaging this critical moment, Paul Starr's "The Social Transformation of American Medicine" stimulated scholars across the disciplines to take stock of medicine's historical and future trajectories. Starr's analysis of American health care and medicine, undertaken in the context of broad contemporary societal, political, and cultural forces, earned him the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes, as well as garnering enduring public acclaim. Indeed, twenty years after its publication, "The Social Transformation of American Medicine" is now a standard in disciplines from health law to political science and history. Despite its undeniable import, Starr's book still provokes argument and strong reaction on all sides, and the question that has puzzled readers since the grand synthesis appeared remains: whether to praise or to criticize it. According to historian Keith Wailoo, health lawyer Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, and political economist Mark Schlesinger, coeditors of "Transforming American Medicine: A Twenty-Year Retrospective on The Social Transformation of American Medicine", a new special double issue of the "Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law", the answer appears to be to do both. How Does the Vision Hold Up? Rife with criticism, praise, and in-depth analysis of Starr's work, this lengthy special issue brings together scholars from many disciplines to offer a comprehensive assessment of the life, the times, the promise, the problems, and the paradoxes of "The Social Transformation of American Medicine". Contributors think critically about the problem of the grand narrative, about why doctors and health lawyers loved the book, about why historians reacted to it with ambivalence, about why its themes resonated as they did, and finally about how the political and policy landscape of health care has shifted in the last two decades. Additionally, the issue includes an extensive precis of salient parts of "The Social Transformation of American Medicine" and concludes with a contentious essay in which Starr himself responds to some of the criticism leveled at him in the preceding pages. With American medicine and health care now at another crossroads - a relentless rise in medical spending on one side, and a persistent sense that Americans are not getting good value for their health care dollar on the other - the issues that Starr originally highlighted (the rise of medical authority and the elaborate dance among doctors, the state, and the corporation) are still of vital importance. "Transforming American Medicine: A Twenty-Year Retrospective on The Social Transformation of American Medicine" vigorously continues the discussion of medicine's past, present, and future that Starr's book set in motion.