Is the Maker Movement Contributing to Sustainability?

Abstract

ICT has already revolutionized content creation and communications. In principle, today, everybody with Internet access, the right skills and equipment can produce digital content composed of virtual "bits" and make it instantly available across the globe. The same is now happening to manufacturing for everyone with access to tools like 3D printers. This inter-changeability of bits and atoms is being called the maker movement, which started as a community-based, socially-driven bottom-up movement but is today also impacting mainstream manufacturing through increased efficiencies, distributed local production and the circular economy. The maker movement thus has significant promise for increasing social, economic and environmental sustainability, but is it currently living up to this potential? This paper reports on work undertaken by the European-funded MAKE-IT project has examined this question through detailed qualitative and quantitative empirical research, including ten in-depth case studies across Europe and a detailed examination of 42 maker initiatives at Europe's foremost city-based maker faire, supplemented by extensive secondary research. Despite the maker movement's short history, the overall results provide sound evidence of its important though variable contribution to sustainability thus far. In addition, there is a strong gender dimension showing that females are underrepresented both as users and leaders of maker initiatives, whilst female leaders tend to achieve much higher sustainability impacts than their male counterparts. There is also clear evidence that maker initiatives in close collaboration with each other and other actors in city-and region-wide ecosystems are much more successful in achieving sustainability impacts than others.

Assessing relations between Circular Economy and Industry 4.0: a systematic literature review

“…Some scholars discussed the exploitation of AM for upgrading current recycling processes -through either new sustainable (Clemon and Zohdi 2018;Mandil et al 2016;Sauerwein and Doubrovski 2018;Woern et al 2018;Zhong and Pearce 2018) or networks (Santander et al 2018)and digitalising the manufacturing process, for example, through a new kind of process (Dutta et al 2001) or managerial strategies (Unruh 2018). Others presented the idea of using AM to support the remanufacturing of products or components (Lahrour and Brissaud 2018;Leino, Pekkarinen, and Soukka 2016), the development of CBMs focused on recycled materials (Mattos Nascimento et al 2018); (Millard et al 2018), the exploitation of biomaterials (van Wijk and van Wijk 2015;Voet et al 2018), or the reuse of products/materials (Bloomfield and Borstrock 2018).…”

“…Li et al 2015) or implementing smart manufacturing practices (Kusiak 2018) (see Table 5). In rare cases, experts focused on exploitation of BDA for other reasons, such as improving disassembly sequence planning (Marconi et al 2018), considering recycling issues during product design (Lin 2018), assessing cost (Angioletti, Despeisse, and Rocca 2017) x (Bassi 2017) x (Bloomfield and Borstrock 2018) x (Clemon and Zohdi 2018) x x (Dutta et al 2001) x (Giurco et al 2014) x (Lahrour and Brissaud 2018) x (Le, Paris, and Mandil 2017a) x (Le, Paris, and Mandil 2017b) x (Leino, Pekkarinen, and Soukka 2016) x (Ma et al 2018) x (Mandil et al 2016) x (Mattos Nascimento et al 2018) x (Millard et al 2018) x (Minetola and Eyers 2018) x x (Müller et al 2018) x (Santander et al 2018) x (Sauerwein, Bakker, and Balkenende 2017) x (Sauerwein and Doubrovski 2018) x (Schmidt et al 2017) x (Sheng Yang et al 2017) x (Syed-Khaja, Perez, and Franke 2016)…”

“…x (Gorissen, Vrancken, and Manshoven 2016) x (Jin et al 2014) x (Kölsch et al 2017) x (A. Q. Li and Found 2017) x x x (Mattos Nascimento et al 2018) x (Millard et al 2018) x x x (Panarotto, Wall, and Larsson 2017) x (Pistol, Bucea-Manea-Tonis, and Bucea-Manea-Tonis 2017) x (Prendeville et al 2016) x (Simons 2017) x (Soroka et al 2017) x (Ünal, Urbinati, and Chiaroni 2018) x Total 6 3 2 2 11 (Ashjaei and Bengtsson 2017) x (Baines 2015) x (Borangiu, Thomas, and Trentesaux 2013) x (Caggiano 2018) x (Franquesa and Navarro 2018) x (Franquesa, Navarro, and Bustamante 2016) x (Herterich, Uebernickel, and Brenner 2015a) x (Herterich, Uebernickel, and Brenner 2015b) x (Herterich et al 2015) x (Jardim-Goncalves, Romero, and Grilo 2017) x (Kowalkowski et al 2017) x (Lee, Bagheri, and Kao 2015) x (Lindström et al 2018) x (Spring and Araujo 2017) x (Verdugo Cedeño et al 2017) x (Yu, Xu, and Lu 2015) x Total 7 3 3 2 2 Millard et al 2018). BDA can be useful for assessing innovative business models through integrative frameworks (Chiappetta Jabbour et al 2017) or for particular types of companies (Soroka et al 2017).…”

Circular Economy Strategies in Eight Historic Port Cities: Criteria and Indicators Towards a Circular City Assessment Framework

“…As shown in the following sections, many cities and institutions are implementing circular economy actions by supporting large industries towards the transition to circular production-consumption patterns. In the same time, a different circular model of production in cities is emerging, enabled by digital fabrication technologies: the "cities of making" or "Fab Cities" (cities of fabrication) [96]. The Fab City movement strives for "locally productive, globally connected self-sufficient cities" [97].…”

Design for Social Sustainability: Using Digital Fabrication in the Humanitarian and Development Sector

“…In short, there is a need for more scalable and transparent ways of working in DF4D projects. We know that greater collaboration has been shown to support sustainability between maker initiatives [55] and that open sustainable innovation [56], including peer to peer networks, can facilitate sustainable outcomes. However, analysis of the cases using the DfSS framework show that this is happening on a rather limited scale.…”