Addressing Hazardous Implications of Additive Manufacturing: Complementing Life Cycle Assessment with a Framework for Evaluating Direct Human Health and Environmental Impacts

Abstract

Summary Additive manufacturing (AM) is transforming manufacturing technology and the distribution of production capital. As the use of three‐dimensional printers begins to extend into homes, schools, and factories, the industry is not well equipped to address the potential for deleterious environmental and health impacts. Proactive assessment tools are needed so that materials developers and designers, printer operators, and print end users can create and choose the most appropriate and safe materials and AM processes based on their use cases. Current life cycle assessments (LCAs) do not provide sufficient information to support materials decisions based on concerns about hazard exposure. To address this shortcoming, we developed a framework that complements LCA with hazard and green design metrics derived from analyzing human health and environmental impacts in the later stages of the AM life cycle. We then identified suitable existing methodologies for evaluation across these stages and synthesized the methodologies into higher‐level metrics for comparative analysis of materials. To illustrate the benefits of this framework, we compared two common AM materials: Autodesk Standard Clear Prototyping Resin (PR48), an open‐source formulation used in photopolymerization processing AM, and bio–polylactic acid, a ubiquitous, biosourced polymer used in an extrusion‐based AM system called fused filament fabrication.

Charting the Environmental Dimensions of Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing

“…Six articles in this Special Issue relate to various forms of LCA. The article by Bours and colleagues () identifies the need for new assessment tools for the selection of material—a gap also highlighted by Garmulewicz () in her book review—and process combinations and proposes a framework that combines LCA with hazard analysis and green design metrics focusing on the latter stages in the AM life cycle. The paper by Walachowicz and colleagues () presents a comparison of the environmental impacts of conventional and laser‐beam–based manufacturing process through an industrial case study of the repair of a burner for an industrial gas turbine unit, including an assessment of the effect of different EoL options.…”

3D Printing and Industrial Ecology

“…Some papers in this special issue advance this line of research (see, e.g., Yang et al 2017;Gutowski et al 2017 Mami et al 2017). It is hoped that the papers on emissions from 3D printing (Bours et al 2017;Azimi et al 2017;Graff et al 2017;Mendes et al 2017) and unit energy consumption will contribute building blocks to future LCA and other systems-oriented work that is typical of IE. The special issue nonetheless provides insights on topics central to IE such as the impact of 3D printing on supply chains (Holmström and Gutowski 2017) and localization of production enabled by 3D production from an environmental perspective (Cerdas et al 2017;Holmström and Gutowski 2017).…”

“…It is hoped that the papers on emissions from 3D printing (Bours et al. ; Azimi et al. ; Graff et al.…”

“…Three papers examine waste generation in 3D printing—one that proposes threshold criteria as part of an evaluation framework for evaluating human health and environmental impacts (Bours et al. ), one that compares material (and waste)‐related impacts in additive and subtractive manufacturing (Priarone et al. ), and a third relating to design of the supports that are “printed” as part of the object being produced and subsequently discarded (Díaz Lantada et al.…”

“…The special issue nonetheless provides insights on topics central to IE such as the impact of 3D printing on supply chains (Holmström and Gutowski 2017) and localization of production enabled by 3D production from an environmental perspective (Cerdas et al 2017;Holmström and Gutowski 2017). Three papers examine waste generation in 3D printing-one that proposes threshold criteria as part of an evaluation framework for evaluating human health and environmental impacts (Bours et al 2017), one that compares material (and waste)-related impacts in additive and subtractive manufacturing (Priarone et al 2017), and a third relating to design of the supports that are "printed" as part of the object being produced and subsequently discarded (Díaz Lantada et al 2017).…”