Sustainability assessment framework of biomedical scaffolds: Additive manufacturing versus traditional manufacturing

Abstract

Sustainability assessment is a method for regulating and enhancing the sustainability performance of a product, process, or system. New technologies have streamlined the process of sustainable growth by progressively moving from conventional manufacturing to new technologies. The current study developed a sustainability assessment framework from the lifecycle perspective of a medical device i.e., scaffold. The framework first involved economic, environmental and social assessment to assess scaffold's life cycle supply chain with two different manufacturing routes, i.e. additive manufacturing (AM) and traditional manufacturing (TM) routes. Further, the sustainability index weight of different indicators and subsystems has been evaluated. Finally, the overall composite sustainability index for AM and TM routes has also been calculated using the entropy weight method (EWM). The economic assessment revealed that AM route has significantly lower cost (20%) than TM route for unit scaffold. Additionally, production rate of TM was found to be lower than AM (24.24%) instead of having high machine capacity utilization. The TM route showed higher environmental load, especially from fabrication, sterilization, and material processing stage. Similarly, social assessment also presented that AM is superior to TM methodology for workers and customers. The subsystem index's weight showed that environmental index (0.8292) has high importance followed by economic index (0.1473) and social index (0.0235). The overall composite Sustainability Index (SI) showed that AM route (SI = 0.9271) is more sustainable than TM route (SI = 0.0136). The sensitivity analysis proved the robustness of the method without changing the ranks of the subsystem's index. Overall, the work provides a quantitative perspective for sustainability assessment of a medical product's life cycle supply chain, which is greatly helpful in making differentiated management measures in the medical industry.