Drivers and barriers for implementation of environmental strategies in manufacturing companies

In order for environmental strategies to come into effect in industry practice, they need to be implemented and applied in daily business routines. Based on a dedicated comprehensive international survey in product developing and manufacturing companies, this paper identifies major current drivers for implementing product life cycle oriented environmental strategies but also barriers and obstacles that need to be addressed. On this basis it provides a number of recommendations for manufacturing companies as well as policy makers to consider for a successful implementation of strategic environmental goals in manufacturing industry.     

Predicting the total environmental impact of product technologies

Many eco design tools and product assessment methods have been developed to improve the environmental performance of products during design stage. Despite the efforts made at the product level, environmental impact in our society is increasing due to environmental impact associated with increased product volume. This article presents a new methodology for product life cycle design assessment to predict the total impact caused in the society by forecasting the market growth of emerging product technologies. A number of products were used to prove the validity of the proposed model and demonstrate the usefulness of the methodology.     

Life-Cycle Assessment of the Recycling of Magnesium Vehicle Components

Life-cycle assessment is basically the assessment of a product from the cradle to the grave. Ideally, a product is recycled after its useful life is complete and the end-of-life of the first life cycle leads to the beginning of a new product system. For the end-of-life of magnesium vehicle parts, there are various possible paths to a second life cycle. When magnesium parts are dismantled or magnesium is separated after shredding, the resulting magnesium alloys can be used for secondary, noncritical applications. However, the typical case for magnesium components is that the magnesium postconsumer scrap ends up in the nonferrous metals fraction that consists primarily of aluminum, magnesium, and heavy metals. Today, aluminum is typically fed into a second life cycle as a secondary alloy, and magnesium becomes part of the aluminum cycle as an alloy addition. In this article, we evaluate the environmental effects of using magnesium in the aluminum cycle. We also assess the influence of end-of-life scenarios on the overall environmental impact of a component’s life cycle. The primary focus of our analysis is the evaluation of the effects of magnesium vehicle components on greenhouse gas emissions.     

LC-CAD: A CAD system for life cycle design

In product life cycle design, a designer should design both a product and its life cycle. Although CAD systems for product design are popular, there are no CAD systems for life cycle design. This paper proposes LC-CAD (Life Cycle-CAD) that represents a product and its life cycle in an integrated manner, manages consistency between these two models, and describes changes of a product along its life cycle (e.g., a component is shredded into fragments of metal in a recycling process). LC-CAD also evaluates environmental, economic, and other performance of designed life cycle using life cycle simulation.     

电弧焊过程的环境负荷评价

将LCA环境评估方法引入电弧焊加工过程,提出对焊接过程环境负荷评价的工艺参数为单位体积或质量的焊缝金属(焊接产品)所涉及的能源、资源和废弃物的物资量,为定量化研究焊接环境负荷提供了一种新的方法.通过对CO2气体保护焊环境负荷的评定,表明废弃物因子项是焊接对环境影响的关键项,该因子应为主要控制和改进因素.获得的CO2气体保护焊的能源因子项与电炉炼钢工艺过程相关项有较好的相对可比性,这也表明该评估模型是合理的,并使得材料实现全寿命周期的定量评估成为可能.     

Absolute sustainability: Challenges to life cycle engineering

The global society faces huge challenges to meet the expanding needs of a growing population within the constraints posed by a climate crisis and a strongly accelerated loss of biodiversity. For sustainability, the total environmental impact of our activities must respect the planetary boundaries that define what is a safe operating space for our civilization. Engineering must change the current focus on eco-efficiency to a search for solutions that are effective in terms of operating within the share of the total pollution space that they can claim. Engineering for environmental sustainability must be life cycle engineering, and the paper positions it relative to the constraints given by the boundaries of the ecosystems, the targets of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals and the strategies for a circular economy. This top-down perspective is combined with a bottom-up perspective from the life cycle of the product and technology. For each stage of the life cycle, the contents of the toolbox for life cycle engineering are reviewed, and a perspective is given on how absolute environmental sustainability requirements can be incorporated in a target-driven life cycle engineering.     

Maintenance: Changing Role in Life Cycle Management

As attention to environmental problems grows, product life cycle management is becoming a crucial issue in realizing a sustainable society. Our objective is to provide the functions necessary for such a society while minimizing material and energy consumption. From this viewpoint, we should redefine the role of maintenance as a prime method for life cycle management. In this paper, we first discuss the changing role of maintenance from the perspective of life cycle management. Then, we present a maintenance framework that shows management cycles of maintenance activities during the product life cycle. According to this framework, we identify technical issues of maintenance and discuss the advances of technologies supporting the change in the role of maintenance.     

Strategic decision-making method for eco-business planning

Due to growing concerns about environmental problems, product life cycle design that aims to maximize total value while minimizing environmental load and costs should be implemented. To do so, the processes of idea generation and decision-making for eco-business strategies, as well as the design of a target product, should be systematically supported. This paper proposes a strategic decision-making method for eco-business planning that allows a designer to easily find a set of eco-business ideas that effectively improves environmental and economic performance simultaneously. A decision-making procedure based on this method is illustrated with a simplified example of a laptop computer business.     

Evaluating the relationship between use phase environmental impacts and manufacturing process precision

The environmental impact of most consumer products is dominated by their use phase. However, these impacts tend to be driven by the manufacture of the product's components since components fabricated with higher precision typically allow the product to operate at higher efficiencies. This paper investigates the relationship between precision and life cycle environmental impacts by extending the traditional LCA methodology to evaluate the impact of manufacturing process precision on the functional performance of a product during its use phase. The implications of this relationship to manufacturing decision-making are also discussed as sustainability concerns may support the use of higher precision processes.     

中国电解铝工业的多因素综合生命周期评价

以货币量化为手段计算了电解铝工业生命周期内的主要污染排放造成的环境成表，并综合电解铝工业的生产成表、整个生命周期内能源耗费、环境成表衡量了电解铝厂的经济发展状况。     

Integration of product entropy and LCA to screen the potential environmental impacts of complex product systems at the end-of-life stage

Applying life cycle assessment (LCA) early in the development of technologies is essential to anticipate potential unforeseen environmental consequences. Modelling the lifecycle of a complex product is nevertheless challenging, as the data required is usually scarce. The approach presented in this paper integrates product entropy into end-of-life modelling for LCA. This enables anticipating the fate of a product after its end-of-use leading to a more realistic allocation of environmental impacts. The approach is demonstrated for the case study of recycling traction batteries with emerging traction battery cell chemistries.     

Integration of a service CAD and a life cycle simulator

This paper proposes ISCL, Integrated Service CAD and Life cycle simulator. ISCL plays the role of CAD/CAE tools for product design in Product Service Systems (PSSs) design. In ISCL, the service CAD supports systematic generation of alternative PSSs based on service modeling, and the life cycle simulator analyzes their economic and environmental performances. The current study applies ISCL to the design of a PSS that includes functional upgrading service of a product, whose life cycle costs are sensitive to both its functional obsolescence and physical deterioration. Performances of alternative PSSs are investigated under different market and technology conditions.     

Global manufacturing and the embodied energy of products

Manufacturing energy efficiency has become a key concern due to increasing energy costs and their associated environmental impact. It is important however, that investigations into the embodied energy of a product be in the context of global manufacturing rather than energy efficiency related to a particular product life cycle. This paper presents a model to assess the impact of global manufacturing on the embodied energy of products. Six different products manufactured from various raw materials in a global manufacturing network were used to carry out the assessment. The results show that product, material and key supply chain parameters play a crucial role.     

Using Fuzzy Multi-Agent Decision-Making In Environmentally Conscious Supplier Management

Integrating environmental issues into supplier management is a challenge to manufacturers. Environmental performance is hard to quantify and difficult to compare with other criteria such as price and quality. This paper proposes a fuzzy multi-agent decision-making strategy to facilitate supplier management. A fuzzy model is used to evaluate the environmental performance of the suppliers and the life cycle environmental impact of the purchased product. Through analyzing manufacturer's business strategy, combined with other decision parameters, an optimal supplier is selected under fuzzy multi-criteria decision analysis.     

Design for Environment — Do We Get the Focus Right?

Sometimes, products resulting from design for environment (DFE) endeavours are sub-optimisations from an environmental perspective, because the tool determines the process and not vice versa. For a more systematic way of getting the focus right a hierarchy of focusing is introduced:1. What is the function provided and what is the optimal way of providing it while making a business out of it? Which product should the company then produce?2. Where are the “environmental hot spots” in the life cycle of this product?3. Which DFE tool supports optimisation of the product by reducing these hot spots?     

Assessing social impacts in a life cycle perspective—Lessons learned

In our globalised economy, important stakeholder groups nowadays hold companies responsible for the social impacts they cause in their product chain through activities like child labour, corruption or discrimination of employees. Many companies thus see themselves in need of a tool which can help them make informed decisions about their social impacts throughout the life cycle of their products. The paper presents lessons learned from four years of work with industry on development of a methodology for Social Life Cycle Assessment and implementation in the industrial product chain. The Social LCA methodology supplements the traditional environment-oriented LCA and the life cycle costing tools in support of sustainability management addressing all three pillars of sustainability: people, planet and profit.     

From Life Cycle Assessment to Sustainable Production: Status and Perspectives

The paper reviews the current state of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) introducing the central elements of the methodology and the latest developments in assessment of the environmental, economic and social impacts along the product chain. The central role of LCA in Integrated Product Policy (IPP) is substantiated describing the different tools of the IPP. An overview is given on Design for Environment (DFE), presenting central findings from the latest decade of research and reviewing different DFE tools which have been developed. Describing the DFX's of Design for environment, a specific focus is devoted to the tools for design for disassembly. Life Cycle Engineering is defined, and a systematic hierarchy is presented for the different levels at which environmental impacts from industry can be addressed by the engineer in order to improve the eco-efficiency of the industry. The role of industry in meeting the sustainability challenge to our societies is discussed, and it is concluded that industry must include not only the eco-efficiency but also the product's environmental justification and the company ethics in a life cycle perspective in order to become sustainable. In the outlook it is concluded that current drivers seem insufficient to create a strong move of particularly the small and medium-sized enterprises in the direction of sustainability, and a need for stronger legislation and for education and attitude building among future citizens and engineers is identified.     

Life Cycle Simulation System for Life Cycle Process Planning

To realize closed loop manufacturing, it is essential to design product life cycles and to plan life cycle processes property. Life cycle simulation has been recognized as an effective tool in this direction. In this paper, we present a life cycle simulation system developed as a general tool for life cycle design and management. The system includes functions for modelling and controlling each life cycle process in a flexible manner. The system maintains usage history of products and parts independently taking the reuse of parts into account. Examples of the simulation are shown for both a rapid life cycle scenario and for a part sharing scenario over the product generations.     

Moderne Strategien (test tailoring) in der Prüftechnik für Korrosionsuntersuchungen in der Mikroelektronik

Modern strategies (test tailoring) of environmental tests for corrosion investigations at micro electronic In former times environmental test techniques and simulations contented a summary of extreme conditions and declared a “worst case environment”. The application of these tests led normaly to unrealistic strong efforts for the test specimen or products. Therefore in modern test techniques was envisaged to use or develop optimized environmental tests for well defined applications. This procedure for the estimation of the optimized test parameters and conditions, also called “test-tailoring”, based on the principle of optimal correlation between test results and real efforts during the product life cycle. This gives the security, that the product withstand the expected environment and not only the test standard.     

Environmental impact analysis of composite use in car manufacturing

Taking the restrictions imposed by the EU ELV directive into account, the use of non-recyclable composite components in car manufacturing is not obvious. However, from a life cycle engineering perspective the introduction of composites in car design is not necessarily negative in terms of additional environmental impact. An extensive life cycle analysis for a reference car design was conducted to study the effects of replacement of conventional steel structures by lightweight composite alternatives. The obtained results reveal the need for a nuanced attitude towards more intensive use of composites in car design. The sensitivity of the analysis results for the used carbon fibre production method is documented, indicating significant improvement potential based on emerging, less energy consuming production methods.