NIST Workshop on Sustainable Manufacturing: Metrics, Standards, and Infrastructure

This webpage is for archival purposes only.  Copies of presentations are provided in the workshop agenda.

The primary objective of this workshop was to bring together experts and various stakeholders to identify and discuss measurement and standards enablers that positively impact the social, economic, environmental, and technological aspects of designing sustainable production processes and products. Sustainable Manufacturing is a systems approach for the creation and distribution (supply chain) of innovative products and services that minimizes resources (inputs such as materials, energy, water and land), eliminates toxic substances, and produces zero waste that in effect reduces carbon (including carbon equivalent) intensity across the entire lifecycle of products and services.

Overview:
The workshop consisted of technical sessions, breakout discussions, and industrial showcases that addressed important issues necessary for the production of sustainable systems. The topics for the technical sessions included (subtopics are given as examples):

1. General Notion of sustainable Manufacturing

• Indicators, Indices, metrics for sustainability, Sustainable Manufacturing Maturity Model, macro level and micro level sustainability, the notion of triple bottom line, corporate social responsibility, etc.

2.  Design of sustainable products, services, and manufacturing systems

• Integrating environmental aspects into product design and development, design for process and product sustainability, product lifecycle management and lifecycle analysis, material science, advanced manufacturing technologies, nano-manufacturing, energy efficiency, conservation for production and use of products, reduce, reuse, and recycling, information infrastructure including advanced models and semantics for product and process, and manufacturing simulation.

3. Standards and industry best practices for sustainable systems

• Standards landscape for product, process representation, national and international standards for sustainability (e.g. ISO 14000, REACH, WEEE,...), risk analysis of policy instruments (cap and trade) and regulations and cost of compliance etc.

4.  Developing Next Generation ICTs for Sustainable Manufacturing

• ICT for Design, Manufacturing and Supply chain Optimization for sustainable manufacturing
• Large Scale Data modeling and semantic technologies for sustainable manufacturing
• Tools, standards, and industry best practices for sustainable systems
• Interoperability among PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) and  LCA tools to support energy and material monitoring and saving

5.  Showcases of sustainable technology: Case studies and business models