Search

The concept of sustainability concerns the ability to satisfy current needs without compromising the possibility for future generations to satisfy their own needs. Over the years this concept turned out to be an essential theme for many industries because of a spread and heightened sensitivity towards environmental protection and social responsibility. Nevertheless, every firm still needs to guarantee the economic viability of its actions and retain its competitive advantage over competitors to remain in the market. This idea corresponds to the triple bottom line approach, according to which the business performance should be monitored from three perspectives, namely economic, environmental, and social. From one side sustainability means the integration of multiple practices, whereas on the other side, the current globalized and competitive economy requires enterprises to combine sustainability with practices of Industry 4.0 to contribute to Circular Economy objectives. The aim is to make choices that improve all three aspects. This work proposes an approach able to involve all three pillars of sustainability and the forefront tools to evaluate them. The case study presents the improvement of the manufacturing process for kitchen furniture. The aim was to create a smart working environment able to increase productivity and mitigate ergonomic risks ensuring a reduced environmental impact. Four parallel manual assembly lines were replaced with one semi-automated line, in which some specific workstations can adapt the product position to the operator's anthropometric measures. The re-design of the workplace allowed both the reduction of out-of-quality pieces and the enhancement of worker well-being. The main results show the achieved optimization for each pillar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Industry 4.0, electric vehicles for logistics are widely used, such as shuttles for transporting people and Autonomous Guided Vehicles for industrial equipment. Environmental impact analyses and eco-design guidelines are essential tools in the design phase, where choices have a decisive effect on the entire product life cycle. This work proposes a method and tool aiming to make industrial electric vehicle designers aware of their choices. The proposed tool allows the preventive analysis of the different life cycle phases to highlight the consumption of materials and energy required to optimize the use and the End of Life strategy. Furthermore, it is intended to support the designers who are not provided with much product lifecycle information to obtain an overall picture of how environmental impacts are spread throughout the lifecycle; this will help provide feedback on their choices a pave the way for a more sustainable use phase in the manufacturing plant. It is based on developing a simplified and modular structure where the main product parameters are included for each life cycle phase. The tool is validated in a case study regarding the customization of an Autonomous Mobile Robot, equipped also a robotic arm; the two are connected by a customized structure. The results, which focus both on environmental and economic perspectives, contribute to filling the existing gap in the environmental evaluation of the analyzed product segment; moreover, they highlight how the material and manufacturing phase may be outstanding over the use or End of Life. This is mainly due to the short distances covered during the useful lifetime, which only cover industrial plant areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the growing attention to environmental challenges has shown that these issues are becoming of more and more interest to both research and industry. Companies are expected to ensure their products are fully traceable and more sustainable, which requires the involvement of all of the actors in the production network. According to this aim, this study proposes a structured approach that uses the traditional traceability concept as a means to identify the main information needed to assess environmental impacts along the whole supply chain (SC). The proposed approach is composed of four main steps: (i) SC modelling to identify all stakeholders and their inter-relations, (ii) data sharing to collect all relevant data, (iii) data elaboration to calculate performance at different levels of detail and (iv) result interpretation to optimise the SC. The distributed implementation of the approach at different SC steps represents a useful means to practically realise a sustainable SC management. A case study involving a leather shoe SC is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in identifying criticalities, supporting the selection of the most appropriate suppliers and correctly setting a management strategy towards the optimisation of internal and external traceability and environmental sustainability performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using a functional requirement analysis, through Design for Manufacture and Assembly and Design for Environment principles, this paper aims at showing a new design method to improve the overall assembly features and environmental sustainability of a packaging solution. This method provides to rank functional requirements according to three different design specifications and also to the number of relationships they have with each other. At the same time, a ranked order of importance for the packaging parts has been realised, considering the number of performed functions. The purpose of this method is to support the designers in focusing their attention on the most important packaging parts and, at the same time, giving them a clear idea of which are the most important functional requirements to be satisfied. This study has been focused on domestic household packaging, but the provided method can be extended to any particular packaging solution and its findings are still valid. According to the Design for Environmental perspective, the actual and the new resulting packaging solutions have been then compared through Life Cycle Assessment method. The results have shown the new packaging solution being able to cut down the environmental impacts, on average, of approximately 30%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing attention to environmental sustainability is not reflected in the effective implementation of ecodesign principles in the industrial context. The main barriers are related to the propensity of companies to optimise only specific aspects directly affected by legislation and to the higher priority given to other drivers such as performance, cost and aesthetics. The present paper faces this issue by proposing an approach to support designers to concurrently deal with environmental, economic and technical performance in all the key phases of the product development process (selection of drivers, evaluation of design alternatives, preservation, sharing and reuse of knowledge, etc.). The approach is grounded on a multi-criteria index, called Product Impact Index (PII), which allows weighting different drivers, verifying the satisfaction of the company's goals, and comparing different design solutions. The method has been successfully applied in two case studies to support the redesign of a cooker hood and a freestanding cooker. Results confirmed its usefulness and effectiveness in overcoming the common barriers to ecodesign implementation in the industrial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designing sustainable systems is challenging since economic, environmental and social factors must be considered. It is particularly hard when heavy interaction with humans take place. The smart home is an example: it is finalized to increase the comfort of dwellings and optimize the devices' behaviour as well as the consumed resources in relation to the users' habits. Elderly represent a special category of users characterized by specific needs: therefore, the design of a smart home is particularly critical since elderly require support in their everyday activities, control of their own lifestyle monitoring, and consciousness about the devices' behaviours. As a consequence, smart home are usually complicated, expensive and not suitable for elderly. This paper defines a methodology to design sustainable smart home systems for elderly. An intelligent network monitoring the users' wellbeing and assuring a controlled use of objects and resources is defined and verified on a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Municipal waste management, especially in developed countries, has a significant impact on the environment and humans that need to be quantified and mitigated. This study aims to investigate and compare the environmental impact and occupational risks of the following three municipal waste collection methods in Italy: street bins, door-to-door collection, and a smart bins system. Six waste categories (paper, plastics, glass, metal, organic materials, and residual waste) are analysed. Environmental performances are calculated by the life cycle assessment (LCA) and material and flow analysis (MFA) methodologies. The ergonomic analysis is based on direct observation of municipal waste collectors and the application of standard assessment methods as RULA, NIOSH, and Snook Ciriello. show that the smart bins collection method is environmentally more effective in all the impact categories considered, thanks to the better quality of collected waste. The residual waste flow directed to landfills has a lower value in the case of smart bins (36.63%) in comparison with door-to-door (52.90%) and street bins (89.56%). The use of smart bins allows higher environmental benefits, passing for the Climate Change impact category from −2.80E+01 kg of CO2eq. of the door-to-door system and −2.74E+01 kg of CO2eq. of street bins to −7.13E+01 kg of CO2eq. of smart bins. Regarding the transport phase, the smart bins system determines a reduction of the impact of about 60% if compared with the door-to-door system for all the impact categories considered. On the other hand, acceptable occupational risks result in street and smart waste collection methods, while poor ergonomics conditions are observed during the door-to-door collection. Containers lifting and emptying are the most critical tasks. [Display omitted] • Smart technologies in urban waste management determines benefits in environmental terms. • Smart technologies in urban waste management preserves the operators' health condition. • Analysis of environmental impact and occupational risk of municipal waste systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial manufacturing is the largest end-use sector in terms of both final energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions (more than 30% of the total); its increase is rapidly altering the world climate. The need to mitigate the environmental impacts of manufacturing processes makes energy efficiency a key success factor for sustainable production. Accordingly, the scientific community's interest in energy management has grown considerably, resulting in several literature reviews on energy modelling and production systems analysis, emissions calculation, sustainability tools and benchmarking techniques. However, a comprehensive analysis of methods and tools aimed at improving energy awareness and assessing their effects on energy efficiency is lacking. To address this gap, this paper undertakes a systematic literature review of energy assessment methods and tools. From the 1367 papers retrieved by searching scientific literature databases, 64 scientific articles met the inclusion criteria and were analysed in detail. The study aims to provide scholars with a picture of the current state of scientific research and to identify the scientific works that could help industry practitioners in energy management. Following the ISO 50001 framework, the methods and tools were divided into three main groups (i.e. energy analysis, energy evaluation and energy-saving measures methods) and the specific findings relating to each group were synthesized. Finally, the paper addresses unresolved issues and challenges and makes suggestions for future research directions. • A systematic literature review of energy assessment methods and tools are provided. • Relevant concepts, themes and characteristics has been summarized. • A classification of energy assessment methods and tools has been presented. • The limits and the possible solution strategies to overcome them are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]