A Method for the Estimation of the Economic and Ecological Sustainability of Production Lines

Abstract

This paper presents a method to evaluate the environmental and economical sustainability of a manufacturing line/plant along its whole life cycle. The concurrent analysis of LCA and LCC allows the process engineers to estimate the production sustainability during the design of a new production line. The method considers costs and environmental impacts of the initial deployment (i.e. initial investment and set-up), use (i.e. workload or maintenance required by each machine) and end of life (i.e. retirement) of the analyzed system. The approach has been tested in a company that manufactures extruded pipes with the aim to evaluate the relative benefits.