On the environmental impacts of 3D printing technology

Abstract

The introduction of new materials is tied to the rapid development of manufacturing processes. Additive manufacturing (AM) has been employed to fabricate a solid three-dimensional (3D) part directly from a computer-aided design (CAD) data. AM is an industrial process that has been widely employed in different industries in the past few years. In fact, this 3D printing is a rapid prototyping technology that involves a series of techniques. Although several challenges and limitations exist in the AM process currently, AM is expected to revolutionize the manufacturing process of engineering components. However, despite the numerous applications of AM techniques in various industries, their environmental impacts are not well documented. AM affords significant changes in production cost, energy consumption, and manufacturing lead times. All these issues have been considered to develop this technology to have higher efficiencies and lower environmental impacts. In this paper, we briefly review AM methods and discuss their environmental impacts. Furthermore, we present the main advantages and disadvantages of AM processes involving polymers. It can be concluded that AM is advantageous in some cases, exhibiting lower energy consumption and comprising shorter manufacturing processes. The analysis and discussion indicate the advantages, limitations, and future research directions for the industrial applications of AM.