A Three Dimensional System Approach for Environmentally Sustainable Manufacturing

CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 61 (2012) 39–42 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology jou rnal homep age : ht t p: // ees .e lse vi er . com /ci r p/ def a ult . asp A three dimensional system approach for environmentally sustainable manufacturing Chris Yuan a, *, Qiang Zhai a , David Dornfeld (1) b a b Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Keywords: Sustainable development Manufacturing system Atomic layer deposition Sustainable manufacturing has received enormous attention in recent years as an effective solution to support the continuous growth and expansion of manufacturing industry. In this paper, we present a three dimensional system approach for sustainable manufacturing from environmental perspective. This method attempts to address the sustainability issues of manufacturing from a pollution prevention standpoint, considering the three key components of manufacturing: technology, energy, and material. Case study is performed on an emerging nano-manufacturing technology, atomic layer deposition. This system approach, when appropriately adopted, could be useful in real sustainable manufacturing practices for overall sustainability management and improvement. s 2012 CIRP. 1. Introduction As manufacturing converts raw materials into products, environmental wastes and emissions are simultaneously gener- ated from the consumption of materials and energy in manu- facturing processes. Statistical data shows that the U.S. manufacturing industry annually consumes 21.1 quadrillion Btu energy (about 21% of total U.S. energy consumption) and generates more than 1.4 billion metric tons of CO 2 emissions (about 26% of total U.S. CO 2 emissions) [1]. In 2009, U.S. manufacturing and related industry released more than 3.37 billion pounds of toxic chemicals into the environment [2]. Such manufacturing wastes and emissions cause not only environmental problems but also economical issues due to the efforts associated with the environ- mental emission mitigation, control, and recovery within and outside the manufacturing system. As the environmental impacts of manufacturing industry are so signiﬁcant in the amount of emissions and wastes, sustainable manufacturing has attracted enormous attention in recent years as a comprehensive strategy for reducing the environmental impact and improving the economic performance of manufacturing industry. In current sustainable manufacturing research, signiﬁcant efforts are put on the development of metrics and tools for environmental performance analysis of manufacturing processes. However, little work has been done in the system level of thinking for the development of an approach to improve the overall sustainability of manufacturing [3]. A comprehensive system approach for sustainable manufacturing needs to be conducted through a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach since the environmental impacts of manufacturing extend well beyond manufacturing, to such life cycle phases as raw material acquisition, material production, usage, end-of-life, etc. [4]. As * Corresponding author. 0007-8506/$ – see front matter s 2012 CIRP. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cirp.2012.03.105 manufacturing is a key stage in LCA which links materials to products, and consumes signiﬁcant amounts of materials and energy in the manufacturing system, in this research, the focus is put on development of a system approach for sustainable manufacturing from environmental perspective. A system approach for environmentally sustainable manu- facturing needs to consider the components of manufacturing from a comprehensive manner [5]. As the most effective and economical strategy for environmental impact control is pollution prevention [6], the ideal system approach for environmentally sustainable manufacturing should focus on pollution prevention in manufacturing. In manufacturing, the environmental emis- sions and wastes are generated from the materials and energy consumed either directly or indirectly in various manufacturing processes. However, what dictates the materials/energy con- sumptions and the emission generations in manufacturing are those manufacturing technologies and process parameters being employed. Accordingly, the pollution prevention opportunities for environmentally sustainable manufacturing are recognized with these three components of manufacturing: technology, energy and material. 2. A three dimensional system approach In this paper, a system approach is developed to support industrial efforts in improving the overall sustainability of manufacturing from pollution prevention perspective. The system approach is developed on the three components: technology, energy and material, of a manufacturing system, and provides a framework for implementation of pollution prevention strategies to reduce the environmental impact and improve the sustain- ability performance of a manufacturing system. The three components in an environmentally sustainable manufacturing system are cross-linked with each other. A schematic structure of the system approach is shown in Fig. 1 below.