Environmental Assessment of Recycled Petroleum and Bio Based Additively Manufactured Parts via LCA

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM) as much as sustainability aspects gained increasing attention in the last couple of years. The vision of resource-efficient manufacturing at batch size one is often claimed as an outstanding property of AM. Fused Filament Fabrication, as one of the most used AM technologies, satisfies this statement only in a restricted sense, through simple handling for non-experts and low-cost materials and machines. Next to performance-driven and process-influencing attributes, the question of a general ecological improvement through thermo-mechanical recycling rises. Therefore, recycling options of the thermoplastics are mandatory to explore. Based on the ISO 14040/44 Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology two different geometries were environmentally assessed during a primary process cycle, using, and recycling. Each geometry was manufactured by a bio-based polymer and internationally produced (PLA) and petroleum-based locally produced polymer (PP) with a corresponding support filament. The methodological approach demonstrates an option how to evaluate the field of AM and recycling regarding environmental aspects. Furthermore, an adaption of the sensitivity towards industrial parameters (material/energy efficiency) showed an ecological benefit concerning recycling.