Concept for a Function-oriented Ecology Analysis in Machinery and Plant Engineering

Abstract

Sustainability is becoming increasingly important, especially for the manufacturing industry due to its high resource consumption and CO2 emissions. Transparency about the environmental impact of products along their entire life cycle is a necessity for creating a shift towards sustainability. However, the possibilities for influencing sustainability are not directly apparent using existing methods such as the life cycle assessment. Within those methods, the use phase is only insufficiently analysed and a differentiated consideration of lifetimes and recovery processes of individual product scopes is not possible. Thus, there is no overview of the possible levers for improving the environmental sustainability performance, especially when dealing with complex products in industries such as machinery and plant engineering. Therefore, this paper introduces a sustainability assessment for machines and plants by focusing on life cycles of individual product scopes in order to enable a realistic analysis of the environmental impact along the entire product life cycle. Based on an assignment of the measured ecological criteria to the product structure and functional structure, fields of action for the development of ecologically improved products can be identified.