Industry 5.0 and the Circular Economy: Utilizing LCA with Intelligent Products

Abstract

While the move towards Industry 4.0 has motivated a re-evaluation of how a manufacturing organization should operate in light of the availability of a new generation of digital production equipment, the new emphasis is on human worker inclusion to provide decision making activities or physical actions (at decision nodes) within an otherwise automated process flow; termed by some authors as Industry 5.0 and seen as related to the earlier Japanese Society 5.0 concept (seeking to address wider social and environmental problems with the latest developments in digital system, artificial Intelligence and automation solutions). As motivated by the EU the Industry 5.0 paradigm can be seen as a movement to address infrastructural resilience, employee and environmental concerns in industrial settings. This is coupled with a greater awareness of environmental issues, especially those related to Carbon output at production and throughout manufactured products lifecycle. This paper proposes the concept of dynamic Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), enabled by the functionality possible with intelligent products. A particular focus of this paper is that of human in the loop assisted decision making for end-of-life disassembly of products and the role intelligent products can perform in achieving sustainable reuse of components and materials. It is concluded by this research that intelligent products must provide auditable data to support the achievement of net zero carbon and circular economy goals. The role of the human in moving towards net zero production, through the increased understanding and arbitration powers over information and decisions, is paramount; this opportunity is further enabled through the use of intelligent products.

Developing a Tool for Calculating the Carbon Footprint in SMEs

“…A review of the above technologies and their supportive research is presented in Table 2. Some of these studies provide a general description of the relationship between CE and Industry 4.0 technologies [110][111][112][113]115], while others focus on specific technologies [116][117][118][119][120] and specific aspects of CE, such as sustainable supply chain management [116,117,119], sustainable product management [121,122], sustainable manufacturing [117,122], and remanufacturing [123].…”

“…IoT A computational system that allows the collection and sharing of products, services, processes, and data in real-time [124,125] [ [110][111][112][113][114][115][116][121][122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130] Cloud Computing Technology that allows remote access to business processes facilitates user interaction and information sharing and enables the visualization of all manufacturing resources and processes [125] [112,114,115,121,124,125,129]…”

Personalised Production in the Age of Circular Additive Manufacturing

“…This was found to be the case in the research, with reductions in greenhouse gases and energy use resulting from the combined use of additive and distributed manufacturing approaches. Turner et al [63] also make the case for the dynamic population of LCA with data streams produced by intelligent products at different stages of their lifecycle.…”

Including Nature-Based Success Measurement Criteria in the Life Cycle Assessment

“…For instance, studies focusing efforts on combining these two limitations are: the life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) [13], life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) [14], and an LCA + C2C but accounts for the three pillars of sustainability [15]. Other variants are economic life-cycle costing [3], the social LCA (SLCA) [16], dynamic LCA [17], and positive sustainability performance (PSP) [13].…”