Sustainability challenges in managing end-of-life rolling stocks

Sustainability has become one of the grand engineering challenges for transportation infrastructure developments. This paper addresses one of the grand challenges in transportation and transit systems (Kaewunruen et al., 2016), particularly for sustainably managing end-of-life rolling stocks or so-called “trains,” which were the key outcomes derived from the 13th UIC Sustainability Conference (http://uic-environment.org/). The challenges and the roles of international standardization in order to substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling, and reuse by 2030 were fully discussed with case studies evidenced from various countries around the world. The key point raised was that it is very critical to increase public awareness of the values of material recycling in order to enhance true sustainability and recyclability of rolling stocks.