Concept for life cycle oriented ecological assessment in tooling

Abstract

The increasing demands of customers to use climate neutral products are leading to severe challenges for manufacturing companies in various industry sectors. The most significant issues lie in measuring and evaluating the resulting environmental impacts across the various lifecycle phases of a product. Especially for the tooling industry, it can be a decisive competitive factor, not only to measure and evaluate the environmental impact of the tool manufacturing processes, but also of the use phase of the manufactured tools. Therefore, this paper presents a concept for ecological assessment for tooling companies, taking the manufacturing phase and the use phase into account. It describes how tool manufacturers can evaluate their own processes based on material and energy inputs and outputs in order to link the environmental impacts to the manufactured product. In tool manufacturing, the digital twin is used as an essential medium for collecting ecological information and converting it into impact variables. The recorded production data from the manufacturing and use phase will be aggregated into different target dimensions: By using the target dimensions “Tool”, ”Tool component” and “Process” the evaluation concept can not only be used for a holistic report on environmental impacts of the manufactured products, but also be used to improve technology use and application from an ecological perspective. By adding the target dimension “Product” the use phase of the tool will be considered, in order to be able to visualize effects in which an ecologically intensive production can lead to reduction in environmental impact over the use phase. Furthermore, the target dimension “Company” is aggregating the derived data, which is necessary for the evaluation of the other target dimensions, to reporting types, such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol or the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive.