مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

۱٫۱٫ Background The emergence of new advanced manufacturing technologies creates opportunities for changing how manufacturing activities are organised. Alongside important advances in innovation processes, technologies may affect the distribution of manufacturing and the subsequent flow of materials and goods with many potential sustainability benefits (Gebler et al., 2014). Such benefits include the potential to move towards a Circular Economy (CE), which aims to radically improve the resource efficiency of society by eliminating the concept of waste and leading to a shift away from the linear take-make-waste model.

It is still unclear however what the implications of the value chain reconfigurations caused by those new technologies are, whether they can realistically enable a more circular use of resources, and under which circumstances they are truly beneficial from a sustainability viewpoint. This requires a better understanding of the information flows and the relationships between stakeholders along the product and material life cycles (Evans et al., 2009).

One such advanced technology is 3D printing (3DP, also known in industry as additive manufacturing). The standard definition of 3DP technology is “a process of joining materials to make objects from 3D model data, usually layer upon layer, as opposed to subtractive manufacturing methodologies” (ASTM, 2012). In other words, 3DP allows objects to be fabricated layer by layer in a continuous or incremental manner, enabling three dimensional objects to be ‘printed’ on demand (Petrovic et al., 2011).