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.…”

Impact of Nanoparticle Additions on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Ceramic Tiles Production

“…Therefore, it is important to quantify the impact of the process to assess whether the incorporation of nanoparticles has a positive effect in reducing the impact on the production of ceramic tiles. Numerous studies have highlighted the importance of life cycle assessment (LCA) as a fundamental tool for addressing environmental impacts on industrial ceramic sector in order to identify opportunities for improving sustainability [ 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 ]. According to recent studies in different countries, such as the one conducted by Boschi et al [ 2 ] in Italy that evaluated environmental impacts in Italian tile production, reductions in the environmental footprint across 90 factories were shown.…”