Moving Towards Green and Sustainable Manufacturing

The pressing needs of energy, water and other resource conservation worldwide is a major engineering challenge. In manufacturing, developing green technologies (from process and tooling to the entire enterprise) is one way to insure that future manufacturing systems are sustainable. To do this, innovation in advanced manufacturing is needed. The basic requirements of green technology are discussed along with methods and tools to insure they are effectively applied and their impacts measured. For situations in which the manufacturing environmental burden is less than the burden for the use of the product leveraging is proposed to insure a total life cycle impact reduction. Examples of several green technologies are presented.