Manufacturing and the Science of Sustainability

Abstract

A new area, called Sustainability Science, is engaging large system scientists to address the challenges that face the future of human society on planet earth. In this paper, the methods and frameworks of diverse disciplines are reviewed and compared with those of the manufacturing community. The results show significant differences between disciplines, including the level of urgency expressed. Synthesizing these divergent viewpoints, this paper makes suggestions for needed research on "sustainable manufacturing". The main message is that manufacturing needs to significantly increase the boundaries of its analysis to be able to understand its effect at the global scale.

Creating sustainable value through remanufacturing: Three industry cases

“…The indicators merged and compiled into Table 2. A claimed benefit of remanufacturing is its potential for preserving the embedded value (energy, materials and labor) of products (Vogtlander et al, 2017) which in turn, can often achieve energy and carbon savings (Gutowski, 2011) and generate jobs (Rashid et al, 2013).…”

“…While remanufacturing is beneficial for material resource conservation by slowing down resource use, a given case needs to be analysed related to its context to identify its environmental impacts (Lindahl et al, 2006) e.g. in the case of products with an intensive energy-use phase, innovation in energy efficiency use may outweigh the benefits of remanufacturing devices already on the market -unless the energy consuming part is replaced (Gutowski, 2011;Gutowski et al, 2011). Such dilemmas are a common challenge for companies and business model innovation has been shown to help reconcile these decisions .…”

Role of energy consumption, cutting tool and workpiece materials towards environmentally conscious machining: A comprehensive review

“…In literature, it is mentioned that sustainability is built on three pillars namely environment, economy and society also known as triple bottom line (TBL) approach. [6][7][8][9][10] The key drivers that play a vital role in supporting these three pillars are energy and resource efficiencies. 11 Gupta and Laubscher 12 provided detailed insight about the key drivers with respect to the three pillars of sustainability.…”

“…During the machining process, electrical energy as input source is required to perform several functions such as plastic deformation in shearing, chip formation and momentum change, friction, ploughing and energy losses throughout the machine tool. 9,10 In order to estimate the total amount of energy consumed in the real production process, several researchers have focused their research work to experimentally and numerically determine the specific cutting energy requirements. Figure 8 represents the energy breakdown of a milling machine.…”