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A vision for sustainable additive manufacturing

Nature Sustainability (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Radical technological innovations are emerging in response to environmental, economic and geopolitical pressures. This affects how we design and manufacture new solutions. Additive manufacturing, one of the enabling technologies of the digital transition, can support more-sustainable manufacturing processes if developed through a system-level approach. In this Perspective, we adopt such an approach: we propose to use established sustainable design methods to innovate additive manufacturing systems and to consider how to make additive manufacturing an enabler of sustainable design in combination with conventional manufacturing. We then discuss how to implement our vision to enable additive manufacturing for sustainability.

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Fig. 1: Envisioning a new role for AM.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Design Society (www.designsociety.org) for supporting and promoting the activities of its special interest groups (SIGs). This Perspective results from a collaboration between the Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) SIG and the Sustainable Design SIG.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Serena Graziosi

  2. Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands

    Jeremy Faludi

  3. Engineering Design and Computing Laboratory, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Tino Stanković

  4. Faculty of Engineering, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Yuri Borgianni

  5. School of Engineering Design and Innovation, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Nicholas Meisel

  6. Division of Product Development, Department of Industrial and Materials Science, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Sophie I. Hallstedt

  7. Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, Singapore

    David W. Rosen

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  5. Nicholas Meisel
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Contributions

S.G., J.F., T.S., Y.B., N.M., S.I.H. and D.W.R. contributed equally to conceptualizing, drafting and revising the paper. S.G. coordinated the research team for the writing of the article.

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Correspondence to Serena Graziosi.

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Graziosi, S., Faludi, J., Stanković, T. et al. A vision for sustainable additive manufacturing. Nat Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01313-x

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