Additive Manufacturing From a Strategic Sustainability Perspective

Abstract

There are high expectations of additive manufacturing (AM) as a technology to improve manufacturing efficiency and reduce material waste. This study aims to clarify the sustainability advantages and challenges of AM technologies used in industry by testing and applying a strategic sustainability life cycle assessment in the early development stage. The result showed possibilities from using the tool and some areas of certain interest regarding improvement potentials of the AM technologies, i.e. value chain management, concept design, optimized material usage, and social sustainability.

The Potential of Additive Manufacturing in the Smart Factory Industrial 4.0: A Review

“…Reducing fuel consumption in goods transportation and material wastes in manufacturing are the two large challenges in AM sustainability. Comprehensively overcoming these challenges and assessment of their real impacts result in a reduction in overall product cost and sustainability improvement [132]. Sustainability dimensions are progressively identified as an applicable tool for public communication and policy in order to carry information about country and corporation performance [121].…”

A Deep Look at Metal Additive Manufacturing Recycling and Use Tools for Sustainability Performance

“…This consists in lifecycle assessment models using sustainability indicators to establish correct metrics from the first stages of MAM development for each specific industry. Metrics were selected to assess process water consumption, raw material usage, energy consumption, potential hazards concerning the work environment, and the physical work done by the employees [1,5,10,[13][14][15][16][17]21,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32].…”

“…The MAM data related to these challenges have proposed few new options for sustainability performance. Moreover, those require further testing, and new validated methods need to demonstrate competent acceptance for recycling and optimal use tools (powder use/reuse, repairing parts, recycled powder, hybrid or consolidated parts) [12][13][14][15][16].…”

“…These materials are extremely useful for micro & nano-technologies used in medicine, space, synthetic biology, precise mechanics, computing, ICT, and other fields [19,20]. Furthermore, MAM has also been successfully adopted within hybrid manufacturing, offering a way to practice subtractive methods accompanied by additive ones in order to fabricate better products with increased surface quality, fatigue strength, and extended quality over the life of product [12][13][14][15][16][17].…”

“…In present conditions, many authors have considered that traditional manufacturing has a more substantial environmental impact than MAM [10,[12][13][14][15]. Important topics to be analysed are as follows: design for AM (DfAM), design for environment (DfE), repair and redesign, recycled material and waste, energy consumption and emissions, health and safety, topics highlighted for an entire lifecycle assessment (LCA) based on lifecycle inventories (LCIs), databases that are partially started to develop information in this topic area [20,[24][25][26][27].…”