Sustainable Manufacturing

Sustainability has raised significant attention in manufacturing research over the last decades and has become a significant driver of the development of innovative technologies and management concepts. The current chapter aims to provide a structured overview of the wide field of research in sustainable manufacturing with a particular focus on manufacturing technology and management. It intends to describe the role of manufacturing in sustainability, outline the complementary approaches necessary for a transition to sustainable manufacturing and specify the need for engaging in interdisciplinary research. Based on a literature review, it provides a structuring framework defining four complementary areas of research focussing on analysis, synthesis and transition solutions. The challenges of the four areas of research manufacturing technologies (“how things are produced”), product development (“what is being produced”), value creation networks (“in which organisational context”) and global manufacturing impacts (“how to make a systemic change”) are highlighted and illustrated with examples from current research initiatives.

Value creation ensures societal prosperity. At the same time, Sustainable Development determines the future of global human wellbeing. Both aspects are based on profound environmental, social and economic mechanisms—and both aspects are closely linked. The Sustainability Dynamics Model describes the direct and indirect effects of value creation together with the three dimensions of Sustainable Development. This contribution introduces and defines the Sustainability Dynamics Model. The effects and dynamics are exemplarily shown. Eventually, the link to circular economy is drawn. In the future, the Sustainability Dynamics Model can be used as a control model in order to predict consequences of value creation towards environmental, social and economic sustainability.

The challenges associated with achieving sustainable development goals and stabilizing the world’s climate cannot be solved without significant efforts by developing and newly-emerging countries. With respect to climate change mitigation, the main challenge for developing countries lies in avoiding future emissions and lock-ins into emission-intensive technologies, rather than reducing today’s emissions. While first best policy instruments like carbon prices could prevent increasing carbonization, those policies are often rejected by developing countries out of a concern for negative repercussions on development and long-term growth. In addition, policy environments in developing countries impose particular challenges for regulatory policy aiming to incentivize climate change mitigation and sustainable development. This chapter first discusses how climate policy could potentially interact with sustainable development and economic growth. It focuses, in particular, on the role of industrial sector development. The chapter then continues by discussing how effective policy could be designed, specifically taking developing country circumstances into account.

Environmental, economic and social changes of any significant proportions cannot take place without a major shift in the manufacturing sector. In today’s manufacturing processes, economic efficiency is realised through high volumes with the use of specialised machine tools. Change in society, such as in the form of mobility and digitisation, requires a complete overhaul in terms of thinking in the manufacturing industry. Moreover, the manufacturing industry contributes over 19 % to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. As a consequence of these issues, a demand for sustainable solutions in the production industry is increasing. In particular, the concept of “cost” in manufacturing processes and thus the “system boundaries” within the production of the future has to be changed. That is, a great number of aspects to the machine tool and production technology industries can be improved upon in order to achieve a more sustainable production environment. Within this chapter, the focus lies on microsystem technology enhanced modular machine tool frames, adaptive mechatronic components, as well as on internally-cooled cutting tools. An innovative machine tool concept has been developed recently, featuring a modular machine tool frame using microsystem technology for communication within the frame, which allows for a high level of flexibility. Furthermore, add-on upgrading systems for outdated machine tools—which are particularly relevant for developing and emerging countries—are poised to gain in importance in the upcoming years. The system described here enables the accuracy of outdated machine tools to be increased, thus making these machine tools comparable to modern machine tool systems. Finally, the cutting process requires solutions for dry machining, as the use of cooling lubricants is environmentally damaging and a significant cost contributor in machining processes. One such solution is the use of internally cooled cutting tools.

Welding is the most important joining technology. In the steel construction industry, e.g. production of windmill sections, welding accounts for a main part of the manufacturing costs and resource consumption. Moreover, social issues attached to welding involve working in dangerous environments. This aspect has unfortunately been neglected so far, in light of a predominant focus on economics combined with a lack of suitable assessment methods. In this chapter, exemplary welding processes are presented that reduce the environmental and social impacts of thick metal plate welding. Social and environmental Life Cycle Assessments for a thick metal plate joint are conducted for the purpose of expressing and analysing the social and environmental impacts of welding. Furthermore, it is shown that state-of-the-art technologies like Gas Metal Arc Welding with modified spray arcs and Laser Arc-Hybrid Welding serve to increase social and environmental performance in contrast to common technologies, and therefore offer great potential for sustainable manufacturing.

Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) pose a serious threat to sustainability in manufacturing. In particular, this phenomenon impacts the sustainability indicators of worker health and safety and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Effective MSD prevention measures would therefore constitute a remarkable contribution to social and economic sustainability. This chapter provides first an outline of existing methods to prevent MSD at the workplace. Analysis of the approaches yields that effective solutions require earmarked finances as well as qualified personnel, both of which are not affordable for many companies. In pursuit of solutions, Human-centred Automation (HCA), a recent paradigm in manufacturing, proposes the design of manufacturing systems using intelligent technology to support the worker instead of replacing him/her. HCA has the unique potential of reducing the effort needed to implement MSD prevention strategies by simplifying the path to social and economic sustainability. This chapter demonstrates this process with the example of the “Working Posture Controller” (WPC), which illustrates how the HCA concept can be applied. Finally, the lessons learned from the case are outlined, providing a vision of how future workplaces can benefit from HCA.

Corporate approaches towards sustainability integration into product development have significantly evolved since the early 1990s. Ecodesign, defined as the integration of environmental issues into product development, arose in the 1990s as a key concept for the enhancement of products’ environmental performance. An intense development of ecodesign methods and tools could be observed in the 1990–2010 period, leading to successful pilot cases in industry, in which environmental gains were demonstrated. In the 2010s, the need for a systems perspective to solve the environmental crisis has been highlighted, and the concept of product/service-systems started to gain momentum due to the high potential for enhanced environmental performance and improved competitiveness, by means of new business models and dematerialization. Recently, a transition towards Circular Economy and the integration of social innovation into sustainability initiatives can be observed, which leads to strategic and holistic sustainability considerations in the design of complex systems. In this chapter, the evolution of sustainability concepts and their integration into product development is presented and exemplified in three periods: 1990–2010; 2010–2020 and 2020–2030. While the first two periods present the actual development of the field, the last period represents the evaluation and projection of the trends developed by the authors. By analysing the three periods, the authors aim to discuss the journey from ecodesign to sustainable product/service-systems over the last decades, experienced by academia and practitioners, and to highlight their views on how the field is going to develop over the next 10 years.

Figuring in sustainability in product development requires a profound understanding of the cause and effect of engineering decisions along the full spectrum of the product lifecycle and the triple bottomline of sustainability. Sustainability design targets can contribute to mitigating the complexity involved, by means of a formalised problem description. This article discusses how sustainability design targets can be defined and presents methods for systematically implementing these targets into the design process. To that end, different means of decision support mechanisms are presented. They comprise (a) use cases of target breakdowns in subsystems, (b) systematic reduction of solution space and (c) assistance in design activities to ensure achievement of sustainability design targets. This paper explains how interfaces to engineering tools such as Computer Aided Design/Engineering (CAD/CAE) or Product Data/Lifecycle Management (PDM/PLM) can be put in place to make the process of retrieving information and providing decision support more seamless.

The concept of Industrial Symbiosis aims at organizing industrial activity like a living ecosystem where the by-product outputs of one process are used as valuable raw material input for another process. A significant method for the systematic planning of Industrial Symbiosis is found in input–output matching, which is aimed at collecting material input and output data from companies, and using the results to establish links across industries. The collection and classification of data is crucial to the development of synergies in Industrial Symbiosis. Public and private institutions involved in the planning and development of Industrial Symbiosis rely however on manual interpretation of information in the course of creating synergies. Yet, the evaluation and analysis of these data sources on Industrial Symbiosis topics is a tall order. Within this chapter a method is presented which describes value creation activities according to the Value Creation Module (VCM). They are assessed before they are integrated in Value Creation Networks (VCNs), where alternative uses for by-products are proposed by means of iterative input-output matching of selected value creation factors.

In order to successfully achieve sustainable corporate development, enterprises have to define and implement a pragmatic strategy. In that pursuit, the discussion of motivation and reasoning behind incorporating sustainability strategies serves as a prelude to the thematic examination of challenges and courses of action in corporate strategy development and implementation. Especially in the context of sustainability, additional legislative and stakeholder requirement considerations make managing these tasks effectively, however, much more challenging. The firm’s overall objectives thus become multidimensional and have to be broken down to the individual departments and business fields. Consequently, considerable effort has to be devoted to the planning, measurement and evaluation, steering and control as well as optimisation and communication processes of the holistically defined corporate value creation. Furthermore, a solution for enterprise sustainability management and its evaluation is necessary for ultimately balancing economic, ecological and social performance factors, to ensure optimized decision-making.

Sustainability is crucial to create long-term high value in manufacturing system. Sustainable value creation requires systems thinking in order to maximise total value captured. There is a need to better understand how companies can improve sustainable value creation. Few tools or structured approaches to thinking about sustainable value are available. This chapter seeks to provide understanding of key concepts for and tools that aid practitioners in sustainable value creation in manufacturing. The chapter also provides case studies on how the tools have helped companies improve sustainability.

Sustainability assessments considering the three dimensions environment, economy, and society are needed to evaluate manufacturing processes and products with regard to their sustainability performance. This chapter focuses on Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA), which considers all three sustainability dimensions by combining the three methods Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC), and Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA). Existing LCSA approaches as well as selected ongoing work are introduced, both regarding the individual approaches as well as the combined LCSA approach. This includes, for instance, the Tiered Approach. This approach facilitates the implementation of LCSA, for instance, within the manufacturing sector, by providing a category hierarchy and guiding practitioners through the various impact and cost categories proposed for the three methods. Furthermore, ongoing developments in LCC and SLCA are presented, such as the definition of first economic and social impact pathways (linking fair wage and level of education to social damage levels) for addressing the current challenges of missing impact pathways for economic and social aspects. In addition, the Sustainability Safeguard Star suggests a new scheme for addressing the inter-linkages between the three sustainability dimensions. These approaches foster the application and implementation of LCSA and thus contribute to developing sustainable processes and products.

Sustainable manufacturing is driven by the insight that the focus on the economic dimension in current businesses and lifestyles has to be broadened to cover all three pillars of sustainability: economic development, social development, and environmental protection.

The United Nations considers the mobilization of the broad public to be the essential requirement for achieving a shift towards a more sustainable development. Science can play a vital role in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) by contributing to ESD-related research and development on the one hand, and by becoming active awareness raisers themselves in education and multiplier networks. Specifically, the use of special Learnstruments, and investment in Open Education formats among other educational tools, may pave the way for accelerated apprehension and appreciation of sustainable manufacturing topics among the greater populace.