Sustainable Manufacturing Engineering is becoming a growing body of knowledge upholded by the interest in the sustainability of the life cycle of products and processes. However, it has not been found a unified framework where research lines on sustainable manufacturing can be driven. This paper reviews and analyses the research works focused on that topic showing the trends emerging in it in the last fifteen years; in particular, it has been deeper focused on the sustainability of machining processes. This study has been achieved from the sustainability point of view of the triple bottom-line, which is defined on the basis of three general dimensions: economic, ecological and equity. On the other hand, it takes into account the tasks associated to the development and improvement of the manufacturing technologies to be developed in the life cycle phases: (1) design, (2) modelling simulation, (3) optimisation and (4) assessment. Finally, as a consequence of this, a framework has been provided to allow the integration of the sustainability in the context of research and professional practices in machining processes. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.