Additive manufacturing and sustainability: an exploratory study of the advantages and challenges

TLDR

Advanced manufacturing technologies and consumer demand for customization are shifting manufacturing scale and distribution. The study examines additive manufacturing’s role and its advantages and challenges for sustainability, focusing on innovation sources, business models, and value‑chain configuration. The exploratory study draws on publicly available data to assess additive manufacturing’s sustainability impacts, summarizing its benefits and challenges. Additive manufacturing offers benefits across product and material life cycles—through redesign, improved material processing, make‑to‑order manufacturing, and closed‑loop systems—yet its immaturity poses challenges to realizing these benefits at each life‑cycle stage.

Abstract

The emergence of advanced manufacturing technologies, coupled with consumer demands for more customised products and services, are causing shifts in the scale and distribution of manufacturing. In this paper, consideration is given to the role of one such advanced manufacturing process technology: additive manufacturing. The consequences of adopting this novel production technology on industrial sustainability are not well understood and this exploratory study draws on publically available data to provide insights into the impacts of additive manufacturing on sustainability. Benefits are found to exist across the product and material life cycles through product and process redesign, improvements to material input processing, make-to-order component and product manufacturing, and closing the loop. As an immature technology, there are substantial challenges to these benefits being realised at each stage of the life cycle. This paper summarises these advantages and challenges, and discusses the implications of additive manufacturing on sustainability in terms of the sources of innovation, business models, and the configuration of value chains.