Manufacturing industries lack the measurement science and the needed information base to measure and effectively compare environmental performances of manufacturing processes, across resources and associated services with respect to sustainability. The current use of ad hoc methods and tools to assess and describe sustainability of manufactured products does not necessarily account for manufacturing processes explicitly, and hence results in inaccurate and ambiguous comparisons. Such comparisons do not proactively contribute to sustainability improvement. Further, we identified that there are no formal methods for acquiring and exchanging information that help establish a consolidated sustainability information base. Our ultimate goal is to develop the needed measurement science and methodology to evaluate sustainability of fundamental manufacturing processes to ensure reliable and consistent comparisons. As a precursor, based on a literature study, this paper identifies the required elements to evaluate sustainability performance for manufacturing with a focus on the environmental impact. Societal and economic impacts, although equally important, are beyond the scope of discussion in this paper. In this paper, we first discuss identified manufacturing process classifications, sustainable manufacturing indicators and computable metrics, relevant information models and software tools, a conceptual model for sustainability characterisation, and finally, conclude with an overview of the future research directions.

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Presently available systems for sustainability assessment do not fully account for aspects related to a product’s manufacturing. In an effort to make more sustainable decisions, today’s industry seeks reliable methods to assess and compare sustainability for manufacturing. As part of the Sustainable Manufacturing program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), one of our objectives is to help develop the needed measurement science, standards and methodologies to evaluate and improve sustainability of manufacturing processes. As a first step towards developing standard reference sustainability characterization methodologies for unit manufacturing processes, in this paper we focus on injection molding with energy as the sustainability indicator. We present a science-based guideline to characterize energy consumption for a part manufactured using the injection molding process. Based on the study, we discuss the selection of process parameters and manufacturing resources, determination of cycle time, theoretical minimum energy computations, and estimated energy computations for characterizing the injection molding process.