Industry 4.0 real-world testing of dynamic organizational life cycle assessment (O-LCA) of a ceramic tile manufacturer

Abstract

In manufacturing, Industry 4.0 operating models enable greener technologies. Thanks to digital technologies, environmental sustainability and organizational competitiveness are mutually reinforcing. The challenge for manufacturing organizations is to understand and quantify the magnitude of this synergistic action, and the holistic perspective of life cycle assessment tools may be a solution to the problem. Organizational Life Cycle Assessment (O-LCA) unlike Product Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is still an under-researched methodology with few applications in manufacturing contexts. This paper aims to fill this gap by implementing and validating O-LCA in the case of an Italian ceramic tile manufacturer. Following the O-LCA guidelines and exploiting Industry 4.0 technologies to perform the inventory analysis, the environmental assessment was conducted in three different plants, comparing the sum of the partial impact results with the overall results scaled to the whole organization. The experimental results demonstrated the validity of the organizational approach as an appropriate methodological option to obtain relevant information on environmental performance that, being based on empirical evidence, better support decision-making processes. Furthermore, the study provides empirical evidence of how Industry 4.0 is an enabler not only for the adoption of greener technologies, but especially for facilitating the organizational environmental impact assessment that is the necessary condition in order to set up and maintain greener manufacturing contexts.

Driving Manufacturing Companies toward Industry 5.0: A Strategic Framework for Process Technological Sustainability Assessment (P-TSA)

“…The company under consideration is an Italian ceramic tile manufacturer that has already implemented digital technologies as part of Industry 4.0 for several purposes. These include the transition to a circular economy model [42], real-time assessment of organizational environmental impact [43], organizational social impact [44], and the life cycle cost of the product [45].…”

“…This analysis used only the primary data collected in real time from the production lines, leveraging the IoT technologies of the Industry 4.0 paradigm. The collected data were seamlessly integrated with the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system through a factory manufacturing execution system (MES), ensuring seamless data exchange and analysis [43]. All categories and items of the primary data collected are presented in Table 1.…”

A Systemic Approach to the Product Life Cycle for the Product Development Process in Agriculture

“…Furthermore, articles related to the product life cycle [61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70] offer a comprehensive view of the Life-Cycle Assessment across various industries and contexts. From analyzing the life cycle of mineral fertilizers to managing plastic waste and the environmental impact of construction material production, these studies highlight the importance of understanding the full life cycle of products to guide sustainable practices and reduce environmental impacts.…”

Disruption in Resource-Intensive Supply Chains: Reshoring and Nearshoring as Strategies to Enable Them to Become More Resilient and Sustainable

“…The LCA study was carried out in accordance with ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards, using a functional unit of 1 m 2 of porcelain tiles with a mass of 21 kg/m 2 (the typical value of the Italian ceramic industry). Instead, the steps of raw material extraction and transportation to the production units were the only ones included in the system boundaries that were established from the cradle to the factory gate [63].…”