Over the last forty years I have been lucky enough to have experienced a unique career researching and developing composite materials, in both industry and academia, during a time of unprecedented expansion in the global composites business. Over that time, I have been involved in areas as diverse as the development of new and novel fibre and composite products through to fundamental materials research. My research efforts have been focussed in three main areas; the fibre-matrix interface region, fibre reinforcements and in particular glass fibres, and the structure-(re)processing-performance relationships of reinforced thermoplastics. The published output of that work is collected together in this series of volumes.

The development of cost-effective methods to deal with glass fibre composite manufacturing waste and end-of-life composite products in an environmentally friendly manner is one of the most important challenges currently facing the industrial and academic composites community. Of the approximately six million tons of reinforcement grade E-glass fibre which is used annually in global composite manufacture, approximately half could be supplied by recycling and reuse of waste and end-of-life materials currently destined for landfill. The 21 papers collected in this volume summarise my outputs on the recycling and reuse of reinforcement glass fibres from research carried out in the Advanced Composites Group at the University of Strathclyde. These papers encompass some of the challenges and potential solutions to this major composites issue.