Mélanie Despeisse

The emergence of sustainable manufacturing practices

Sustainable manufacturing appears to be a rapidly developing field and it would be expected that there is a growing body of knowledge in this area. Initial examination of the literature shows evidence of sustainable work in the areas of product design, supply chain, production technology and waste avoidance activities. Manufacturers publish metrics showing significant improvements in environmental performance at high level but information on how these improvements are achieved is sparse. Examining peer-reviewed publications focused on production operations there are few cases reporting details and there has been little prior analysis of published sustainable manufacturing activity. Moreover, the mismatch between academic and practitioner language leads to challenges in interpretation. This article captures and analyses the types of sustainable manufacturing activities through literature review. In turn, this can help manufacturers to access examples of good practice and help academics identify areas for future research.

Industrial ecology at factory level: a prototype methodology

The concept of sustainable manufacturing is a form of pollution prevention that integrates environmental considerations in the production of goods while focusing on efficient resource use. Taking the industrial ecology perspective, this efficiency comes from improved resource flow management. The assessment of material, energy and waste resource flows, therefore, offers a route to viewing and analysing a manufacturing system as an ecosystem using industrial ecology biological analogy and can, in turn, support the identification of improvement opportunities in the material, energy and waste flows. This application of industrial ecology at factory level is absent from the literature. This article provides a prototype methodology to apply the concepts of industrial ecology using material, energy and waste process flows to address this gap in the literature. Various modelling techniques were reviewed and candidates selected to test the prototype methodology in an industrial case. The application of the prototype methodology showed the possibility of using the material, energy and waste resource flows through the factory to link manufacturing operations and supporting facilities, and to identify potential improvements in resource use. The outcomes of the work provide a basis to build the specifications for a modelling tool that can support those analysing their manufacturing system to improve their environmental performance and move towards sustainable manufacturing.

The role of additive manufacturing in improving resource efficiency and sustainability

Additive manufacturing is heralded as a revolutionary process technology. While it has yet to cause a dramatic transformation of the manufacturing system, there are early signs of how the characteristics of this novel production process can improve resource efficiency and other sustainability aspects. In this paper, we draw on examples from a wide range of products and industries to understand the role of additive manufacturing in sustainable industrial systems. We identify four main areas in which the adoption of additive manufacturing is leading to improved resource efficiency: (1) product and process design; (2) material input processing; (3) make-to-order product and component manufacturing; and (4) closing the loop.

Modelling and Tactics for Sustainable Manufacturing: An Improvement Methodology

Sustainable manufacturing practices demonstrated by companies are a key ingredient to increasing business performance and competitiveness. Whilst reported practices are good examples of what has been achieved, they are often company specific and difficult for others to reproduce since they provide few, if any, details on how improvements were achieved. Sustainable manufacturing strategies offer insight to the overall approach taken by companies but they can lack practical support for implementation. This paper examines the gap between strategic direction and practices to extract the mechanisms behind the practices and formulate sustainable manufacturing tactics (which provide information on how specific improvements can be implemented). The research is based on extensive collection and analysis of available case studies in published literature and interaction with industry. The combined use of resource flow (material, energy and waste) modelling and the tactics can support manufacturers in their journey towards sustainability by providing generic solutions on how to adapt their operations. An improvement methodology is developed by combining the manufacturing ecosystem model and tactics to guide manufacturers in a structured and systematic way to identify improvement opportunities. The paper explores the design challenge of developing such an improvement methodology to assist users in identifying which tactics might apply in their specific context.

Factory modelling: combining energy modelling for buildings and production systems

Traditionally, manufacturing facilities and building services are analysed separately to manufacturing operations. This is despite manufacturing operations using and discarding energy with the support of facilities. Therefore improvements in energy and other resource use to work towards sustainable manufacturing have been sub-optimal. This paper presents research in which buildings, facilities and manufacturing operations are viewed as inter-related systems. The objectives are to improve overall resource efficiency and to exploit opportunities to use energy and / or waste from one process as potential inputs to other processes. The novelty here is the combined simulation of production and building energy use and waste in order to reduce overall resource consumption. The paper presents a literature review, develops the conceptual modelling approach and introduces the prototype IES Ltd THERM software. The work has been applied to industrial cases to demonstrate the ability of the prototype to support activities towards sustainable manufacturing.

Strategies and Ecosystem View for Industrial Sustainability

Industrial sustainability is a rapidly developing field of research. Numerous industrial examples show that it is possible to decouple economic performance and environmental degradation using the waste and energy hierarchies, but they are not applied systematically. This paper reviews approaches and strategies for industrial sustainability which has been synthesised by the authors into an improvement hierarchy (action framework). By adopting an ecosystem view (thinking framework), these strategies applied at various levels can provide guidance to create sustainable industrial systems. Resource flows within, in and out of a given system are represented using a conceptual ecosystem model. Because “less bad is not good enough”, a novel industrial ecosystem model is proposed based on the principles of circular economy, i.e. industrial ecology and cradle-to-cradle, to promote positive environmental impact and natural capital regeneration as an ideal model for future industrial systems. The model change can be explained and guided by the improvement hierarchy applied at global level to connect the action and thinking frameworks, thereby contributing to lessen the barriers for practitioners to adopt and implement industrial ecology and cradle-to-cradle concepts.

Improving Factory Resource and Energy Efficiency: The FREE Toolkit

Eco-efficiency is defined as the concept of doing more with less; in other words, creating goods and services while preserving natural resources and reducing waste and pollution during manufacturing. This paper presents a toolkit for eco-efficiency at factory level: the Factory Resource and Energy Efficiency (FREE) toolkit. It contains five key elements; (1) see waste, (2) find solutions, (3) set targets, (4) assess yourself, and (5) create good habits. The FREE toolkit contains a range of games, tools and methods mapped against these five elements to integrate sustainability into factory activities. This paper presents the toolkit structure and an example of the journey for eco-efficiency.

Teaching energy efficiency in manufacturing using gamification: A case study

Sustainability is a critical topic and needs to be systematically integrated in engineering education and professional training courses in manufacturing organisations. Eco-efficiency is a key sustainability concept but it can be challenging to teach as it is highly practical and thus ill-fitted for purely classroom environments. Games and simulations provide a good mechanism for effective and engaging teaching on such practical topics. This paper describes a case study of four game sessions ran in a manufacturing company. This empirical research shows how the card game ‘One thousand kWh’ enabled participants to actively learn about energy efficiency in manufacturing operations, and to explore sustainable manufacturing practices and barriers to implementation.

Skills and education for additive manufacturing: A review of emerging issues

The recent advances in digital technologies and in additive manufacturing (AM) in particular are revolutionising our industrial landscape. These changes require new engineering and management skills to exploit fully and sustainably the benefits offered by these advanced technologies. The current talent shortage calls for new education programmes to deliver a skilled, capable and adaptable workforce. Existing courses on design, engineering and management related to production and manufacturing do not systematically deliver the necessary skills and knowledge for an effective deployment of AM technologies. Based on a literature review and evidence collected from multi-stakeholder workshops, this paper presents the key themes for education programmes to address the current skill gap and barriers to AM adoption and exploitation.

Product Circularity Assessment Methodology

In today’s dynamic economic environment, industry is facing global challenges such as meeting the needs of a growing population, resource scarcity and landfill space shortage. These issues highlight the need for a dramatically more efficient use of natural resources to create social and economic value for society while respecting the carrying capacity limits of the planet. Additive manufacturing technologies provide opportunities to support sustainable manufacturing and the circular economy paradigm. These opportunities can be leveraged throughout the product lifecycle: energy and material consumption reduction in manufacturing, lower material use through maintenance, reuse, remanufacturing and recycling. Despite these benefits being more broadly recognised in recent years, industrial applications are still scarce. This work proposes a quantitative methodology to assess the circularities arising along the lifecycle of a product fabricated with additive manufacturing technologies, thereby supporting the shift to more circular industrial systems and sustainability.