Search

Funding Information: João Pedro Oliveira acknowledges funding by national funds from FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia , I.P., in the scope of the projects LA/P/0037/2020 of the Associate Laboratory Institute of Nanostructures, Nanomodelling and Nanofabrication – i3N. This activity has received funding from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) – Project Smart WAAM: Microstructural Engineering and Integrated Non-Destructive Testing. This body of the European Union receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme . Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors The industrial progress made throughout these years has led to great results in terms of producing fast and with good quality. However, the impacts related to that production, whether these are environmental, economic, or social have been, at times, neglected. The manufacturing sector, as one of the most polluting sector, felt the urge to adapt to this industrial progress and find ways to produce with improved sustainability goals without compromising the quality of the final product and the production time. Industry easily understood the benefits of this greener approach, and, with this, new sustainable technologies started to emerge. Additive Manufacturing (AM) is one of those technologies that provide alternative sustainable paths to traditional manufacturing. In order to generalize the benefits of AM production in terms of sustainability, when compared to traditional processes, further investigations must be conducted. In this sense, the proposed work has the intention of finding the environmental impacts associated with a particular AM technique for the fabrication of metal parts, Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM). A practical work based on the production of three different complexity metal parts considering an additive (WAAM) and a subtractive (Computer Numerical Control (CNC) Milling) manufacturing process is developed. To quantify the environmental impacts of both processes, the author resorts to the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. The assessment is conducted in the SimaPro 9.2 software, accordingly to ISO 14044:2006 standard. The results allow a comparison between both types of manufacturing and enable the suggestion of measures to decrease the environmental footprint of WAAM. It was found that WAAM approach leads to a material saving ranging between 40% and 70% and an environmental impact reduction in the range of 12%–47%, compared to the subtractive approach for fabricating the 3 geometries considered in this study. The conclusions obtained are specific to this particular application and, once more, it is acknowledged that in order to reach a global understanding relative to this technology's environmental implications, extra research still needs to be made. publishersversion published

Nowadays, there is a growing promotion to label products ecologically in European markets. Knowing that daily products have relevant environmental impact associated with their production, it is of utmost importance to analyse all the related production processes for a better understanding of each process impact. The present study analysed the potential environmental impacts of a Portuguese regional product, the Beira Baixa cheese, coming from the largest national sheep milk region. So, a life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology is used from -cradle-to -gate, including the supplying of the animal feedstock. Impact calculations are performed using the ReCiPe midpoint 2008 method, allowing an analysis of the environmental impacts contributing to climate change, terrestrial acidification, freshwater and marine eutrophication of all productive processes. The results have shown that the greatest impacts occur within the milk production process for all four selected impact categories. This happens mainly due to the fodder cultivation process, also necessary to produce animal feed, which contain processes of fertilization and land preparation. The enteric fermentation and manure management processes have also shown relevant contributions. The impact assessment also showed that the cheesemaking industry has practically insignificant impacts. Nonetheless, the cheesemaking industry can promote their business with these results, by advertising and marketing their product as environmentally friendly, with production processes causing reduced impacts, and therefore also their products., Pedro Dinis Gaspar acknowledges Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT—MCTES) for its financial support via the project UIDB/00151/2020 (C-MAST—Centre for Mechanical and Aerospace Science and Technologies). Ana Cláudia Dias and Paula Quinteiro acknowledge FCT-MCTES for the contracts CEECIND/02174/2017 and CEECIND/00143/2017, respectively, and for the financial support to CESAM (UIDB/50017/2020+UIDP/50017/2020), through national funds. Radu Godina acknowledges Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT—MCTES) for its financial support via the project UIDB/00667/2020 (UNIDEMI).