5. Principles of Green Manufacturing

The purpose of this chapter is to illuminate some of the basic principles of green manufacturing. That is, establish a framework of principles against which relevant examples can then be mapped to determine how green a system or solution is and find areas for potential improvements. This forms the structure of the discussion in following chapters where specific manufacturing processes or systems are investigated in more detail. We propose the following five principles: (1) a comprehensive systems approach must be used to evaluate and improve manufacturing processes from a green perspective, (2) the system should be wholly viewed across both the vertical and horizontal directions, (3) harmful inputs and outputs of the system to the environment and humans should be reduced or removed, (4) net resource use should be lowered, and (5) temporal effects on the system should always be considered. These are discussed in detail.