Enabling Non-expert Sustainable Manufacturing Process and Supply Chain Analysis During the Early Product Design Phase

Abstract

Consumers are pressuring companies to produce products with superior sustainability performance, yet educators are disadvantaged in training students about sustainable engineering and many engineers are often not well-positioned to perform product sustainability assessments. In particular, quantifying environmental impacts is a key aspect of achieving improved product sustainability performance that has garnered much attention over the past two decades, but tools remain deficient to assist manufacturing decision making. In light of efforts undertaken to develop sustainability assessment methodologies, we review recent developments in quantifying a widely adopted environmental performance metric, carbon footprint, in manufacturing processes and supply chain networks. We also present a methodology to address the deficit identified from this review for simple, easy-to-use sustainability assessment methods and tools. We suggest a questionnaire-based methodology to provide non-experts with a better understanding of sustainability performance, specifically during the product design phase. An application of the methodology is demonstrated to quantify and compare environmental impacts for the production of two quadcopter upper shell designs. The review presented can help the sustainable design and manufacturing community in identifying research gaps, while non-expert engineers and engineering students can benefit from application of the presented methodology in learning and in practice.