Environmental performance of chair production and distribution in conventional and additive manufacturing
Wang, Tiffany (2023)
Diplomityö
Wang, Tiffany
2023
School of Energy Systems, Energiatekniikka
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Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2023080994386
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2023080994386
Tiivistelmä
The growing availability of hobbyist- and industrial-scale 3D printers has started the transition toward mass customization achieved through distributed production. 3D printing-supported mass customization, as opposed to conventional mass production, shortens the lead time between design and demand, bringing about new supply chain models. In this life cycle assessment (LCA) study, a chair was selected as the basis of a process- and system-level comparison between an additive (AM) and conventional manufacturing (CM) system. The preliminary findings show that the environmental impacts of the 3D-printed chair are greater than that of the conventional chair on the process level. The result is the opposite for the system-level comparison between AM’s distributed production against CM’s centralized one. Furthermore, the AM chair has notably lower environmental impacts than the CM chair when compared by kilogram, not by chair. This infers that if the weight of the chairs were the same, then the AM chair would be the more sustainable option.