Design for sustainable additive manufacturing: A review

The growing environmental burdens and concerns have triggered the world`s alertness to adopt sustainable manufacturing to minimize resource depletion, global warming, and waste disposal. Additive manufacturing (AM) has become prevalent in the last few decades due to its high variety of use and enormous benefits to the industry. AM is being employed in several applications such as the food sector, biomedical engineering, medical/pharmaceutical industries, aviation industries, aerospace science, defense sector, automotive, bioremediation/environment sector, etc. AM is efficient in producing customized and sophisticated products. In order to satisfy the sustainability requirements, the deployment of AM provides improvements in energy consumption, production costs, and production lead times. Besides, AM technologies are considered environmentally sustainable as they produce less material waste, less CO2 emissions, and enhance the circular economy. Based on the conducted Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in the open literature, AM can produce savings due to lesser material inputs, handling, and shorter supply chain networks. This review article presents the sustainability elements of the AM and different circular economy strategies supported by AM and displayed their potential benefits. This review article highlights the potential benefits, importance, and opportunities of adopting AM. Also, it argues the potential challenges that may face AM deployment in each phase of the product life cycle and provides some recommendations and tactics to surpass these obstacles. In addition, this review demonstrates the research gaps and proposes directions for future work. The aim of this review paper is not only to shed the light on AM as a sustainability provider but also to encourage the organizations, policymakers, and AM community to adopt sustainability guidelines/ framework. It can be concluded that the relevant research on AM sustainability is in the preliminary stage and future detailed and intensive research is needed especially on the long effects of AM on the environment.