Environmental Technology is a forum for the rapid publication of technological manuscripts in the field of applied environmental studies, including environmental biotechnology, environmental and sanitary engineering, industrial waste management and hazardous waste disposal, air and water pollution control, solid waste management, industrial hygiene and associated technologies.

The Editorial Board of Environmental Technology (Letters) was formed in the spring of 1978. Publication commenced in January 1980 and has appeared monthly ever since. Original conceived as a ‘camera-ready' journal with phototype set titles, early issues contained five to six papers and each issue was approximately 40 pages, in 1986 this was increased to 60 pages and in 1988 a further 20 pages were added. By the end of 1989 a perfect bound format had been adopted as issues regularly exceeded one hundred pages. In 1990 the word 'Letters' was removed from the title and as a consequence the ISSN changed from 0143-2060 to 0959-3330. From December of that year typesetting was introduced and as a consequence the number of manuscripts published each month increased from 8 to 12. With these developments came a progressive extension of the interval from acceptance to publication which was 2-4 months in the early eighties and had grown to 6-8 months by 1992.

A new editorial strategy was introduced in 1996 devolving greater responsibility to the Regional Editors, the format was changed to permit more copy on each page and issues were increased to 120 pages. With these improvements the interval from acceptance to publication of well presented and topical manuscripts was reduced to 4 months and the review period for such was reduced to 2 months, thus such papers are now published with 6 months of submission.