The sustainable manufacturing concept, evolution and opportunities within Industry 4.0: A literature review

Abstract

Today’s society is becoming aware that a new economic model of production and consumption must take into account its environmental and social impact. Industries are under increasing pressure from stakeholders to be transparent in reporting the environmental and social impacts of their operations. In this context, sustainable manufacturing must minimize negative environmental impacts and consumption of energy and natural resources, while also being socially responsible and economically viable. That is why the sustainable manufacturing concept is gaining increasing attention both in the research community and in organizations, especially in the industrial sector. However, even today, there is a great diversity of interpretations and ideas associated with this term. Accordingly, this article first presents an overview of the main concepts related to sustainable manufacturing, and metrics to evaluate organizations’ sustainability performance, and then an outlook of current trends. Our work highlights the consistencies and inconsistencies in the research community related to the interpretations of sustainable manufacturing and Industry 4.0, as well as the lack of consensus about the true social impact of Industry 4.0. However, the positive ecological and economic impacts of sustainable manufacturing seem fairly widespread. In this way, sustainable manufacturing practices seem to be reinforced by initiatives within the fourth stage of industrialization – the so-called Industry 4.0 – which offers great opportunities for sustainable manufacturing, thanks to digital transformation.

Environmental Sustainability of Digitalization in Manufacturing: A Review

“…Meanwhile, the development of digitalization increases the competitive pressure within manufacturing companies, as the power of technology ensures higher quality, lower costs, and shorter delivery times. This raises the industrial standards and requires companies to go beyond the deployment of management philosophies based exclusively on efficiencies [24]. Therefore, manufacturing companies are increasingly taking environmental issues into their strategy development by promoting manufacturing processes that minimize environmental impact [25].…”

“…Information from manufacturing, use, and even recycling stages can provide opportunities for design improvement [96]. The intelligent programming integrated in this IoT platform could carry out eco-design by incorporating an efficient management of energy consumption in product design [24]. Meanwhile, the amount of material consumption can also be optimized through information transparency enabled by intelligent programming [24].…”

“…In the production stage, the interconnection of processes allows machines to communicate through the network and share information about parameter setting, stock levels, problems or errors, and changes of demand [8,15,24]. From the point of material acquisition, modular design promotes conservation of raw material in production and reduces material consumption [54].…”

“…At the design stage, rapid prototyping in direct manufacturing is increasingly adopting AM technology [11,22,24]. It eliminates resource consumption of tools and customizes production [11,22], at the same time reducing the time to market with high customization [24]. The highly customized components/products production leads to less inventory of raw material and final products, thus contributing to a reduction of environmental impact [22].…”

Lean Manufacturing and Environmental Sustainability: The Effects of Employee Involvement, Stakeholder Pressure and ISO 14001

“…For this reason, manufacturing and environmental sustainability may be regarded as incompatible terms. However, within the research community, the paradigm of sustainable manufacturing is gaining acceptance and it is attracting the attention of practitioners as well [3]. The concept of sustainable manufacturing has evolved (see reviews in [3,4]) since the first studies based on environmentally conscious manufacturing and now it is defined as the creation of products that, throughout their life cycle, from the perspective of the triple bottom line, limit their negative impacts on Nature and society while offering economic and social value [5].…”