Design for sustainability

The fashion industry is responsible for a significant contribution to environmental pressure in the European Union. The present study aims to quantify the environmental impacts of a leather shoe production chain and identify the most criticalities in terms of companies, processes, and materials. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology was used to assess the impacts related to the production of a pair of classic man leather shoes. Slaughtering and tanning resulted in the less environmentally sustainable stages for almost all the analysed impact categories, except water resource depletion and ozone layer depletion. Such outcomes are mainly due to the high distance from animals' skin suppliers to slaughterhouses and tanneries, the use of lorries transport, and the large use of unsustainable chemicals to treat the leather. Going downstream, the main hot spot refers to the use of cotton during upper manufacturing and shoe assembly and finishing. Three alternative realistic production scenarios were simulated to find the best sustainable mix. They focused on alternative means of transport, the substitution of cotton, and green purchasing of upper and lining. An environmental impact reduction of about 30% can be obtained if all the suggested scenarios are implemented.

Keywords: environmental impact , footwear industry , Leather shoe supply chain , Life Cycle Assessment

The development of new methods for the correct disposal of waste is unavoidable for any city that aims to become eco-friendly. Waste management is no exception. In the modern era, the treatment and disposal of infectious waste should be seen as an opportunity to generate renewable energy, resource efficiency, and, above all, to improve the population's quality of life. Northern Italy currently produces 66,600 tons/year of infectious waste, mostly treated through incineration plants. This research aims to explore a more ecological and sustainable solution, thereby contributing one more step toward achieving better cities for all. Particularly, this paper presents a conceptual design of the main sterilization chamber for infectious waste. The methodology selected was Design Thinking (DT), since it has a user-centered approach which allows for co-design and the inclusion of the target population. This study demonstrates to the possibility of obtaining feasible results based on the user's needs through the application of DT as a framework for engineering design.

Keywords: Design thinking , Eco-friendly city , Infectious waste , Resource efficiency , Sustainability , Waste management

In the present paper, the environmental impact of an innovative technology, based on a zero-waste approach, for reclaiming carbon fiber prepreg scraps is assessed. The innovative process, proposed within the European project CIRCE, aims at reclaiming scraps produced during the cutting operation of virgin prepreg, avoiding the waste materials landfilling or incineration. The prepreg scraps were transformed into a ready-to-use raw secondary material by using two specifically developed automated systems for cutting and peeling of the scraps. By exploiting the prepared scraps in a compression molding process, recycled composite parts were produced. The evaluation of the environmental impact was carried out by means of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, using the different impact assessment methodologies based on the Cumulative Energy Demand, Global Warming Potential and ReCiPe methods. Furthermore, tensile tests were performed at room temperature to investigate the mechanical properties of the recovered scraps products. In order to evaluate the environmental benefits of the innovative compression molding production with recovered prepreg scraps, the LCA analysis was also performed on two different traditional virgin production scenarios, i.e. the compression molding production with virgin prepreg and the autoclave processing with virgin prepregs, both used for the production of CFRP parts. The results show that the reclaim process leads to a strong reduction of the environmental impacts with respect to traditional composite production processes, demonstrating that such process can represent a valid alternative for a more sustainable manufacturing of composite products.

Keywords: Life cycle assessment , Prepreg scraps , Sustainability , Zero waste technology

Reducing energy/resource consumption in production processes can significantly improve the environmental performance of manufacturing systems. This paper proposes a sustainable manufacturing method and tool and describes its application in a mechanical engineering company which produces automotive components. The tool allows to map the processes/activities and the related resources consumed, assess the efficiency through specific key performance indicators, identify process criticalities and thus set mitigation or improvement strategies.

Keywords: Energy efficiency , Energy management , Resource consumption , Resource mapping , Sustainable manufacturing tool

The COVID-19 occurrence is causing a global request for effective measures aimed at mitigating the infection spread. Facemasks have been identified as an essential device for people to protect themselves as well as the others from aerosol containing virus. Facemasks provide a critical barrier, reducing the number of infectious viruses or bacteria in exhaled breath. The present review describes the most relevant literature studies on materials and processing technologies used for facemask development and testing. Antibacterial and antiviral treatments are considered. Testing methods for measuring the actual performance are explained in detail. Strategies related to end use are analyzed in terms of reuse, the sanitization process, and recycling. This work derives from a synergic, multidisciplinary, and interdepartmental collaboration in the workgroup of Tuscia University, founded in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, aimed at providing scientific support and information on facemask materials.

Keywords: coronavirus , facemasks , filtration , polymer , processing

Advanced materials, especially carbon fiber reinforced composites (CFRP), have gained the attention of different industries which produce lightweight and high-performance components. The most used manufacturing processes to realize these kinds of products are Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) and vacuum bag molding with autoclave curing. RTM is based on dry fiber technology and it appears the most promising manufacturing process to realized high-quality carbon fiber parts reducing cost and manufacturing time, especially if high pressure variants are employed. On the other hand, vacuum bag molding with autoclave curing is a very consolidated process which is, however, associated with long manufacturing time and costs as well as to low repeatability of the process due to the high labor input. Out-of-autoclave methods, such as pressure bag molding (PBM) have been developed to overcome the issues of vacuum bag molding process. From the environmental point of view, the manufacturing of CFRP components is associated with high environmental loads due to the impacts related to both raw materials and manufacturing processes. For this reason, reducing the energy consumption of production phases can lead to the development of greener CFRP products. In this context, the main scope of the present research is to evaluate and compare the environmental loads of a component for the automotive industry realized exploiting the RTM, the PBM and the bag molding processes to determine which one is ecofriendlier. This analysis has been conducted following the standard Life Cycle Assessment methodology based on a “cradle to gate” approach. In this way, the use phase and the disposal of the CFRP component have not been included in the analysis. Results have been evaluated by comparing the equivalent CO2 related to each manufacturing process.

Keywords: Carbon fiber composites LCA , CFRP , Environmental impacts , PBM , RTM

Additive manufacturing of composite materials is gaining important market shares, especially in the aerospace field, since it leads to a reduction of the environmental impacts while ensuring high product performances. Structures of particular interest are isogrids due to their high compression strength-to-weight ratio. In this research, isogrids and solid panels were 3D printed using carbon fiber reinforced polyamide. All the parts presented the same width, height and specific resistances but they differ in thickness, ribs dimensions and drying process after printing. A comparison between their environmental impacts and buckling loads have been conducted. The objective was to determine the configuration which leads to the best compromise between sustainability and mechanical performances.

Keywords: Buckling , Composite 3D printing , Isogrid structures , Life Cycle Assessment

Additive Manufacturing (AM), allowing the layer-by-layer fabrication of products characterized by a shape complexity unobtainable with conventional manufacturing routes, has been widely recognized as a disruptive technology enabling the transition to the Industry 4.0. In this context, the design of a Portable Assisted Mobile Device (PAMD) prototype was considered as a case study. The best practices of the re-design for AM were applied to three of the main structural components, and the most sustainable manufacturing approach between AM processes and the conventional ones was identified with respect to cumulative energy demand, carbon dioxide emissions and costs. The paper aims to promote the debate concerning the correlation between design choices, process selection and sustainable product development.

Keywords: Cost assessment , Design for Additive Manufacturing , Energy efficiency , Portable Assisted Mobile Device (PAMD)

Product and process digitalization is pervading numerous areas in the industry to improve quality and reduce costs. In particular, digital models enable virtual simulations to predict product and process performances, as well as to generate digital contents to improve the general workflow. Digital models can also contain additional contents (e.g., model-based design (MBD)) to provide online and on-time information about process operations and management, as well as to support operator activities. The recent developments in augmented reality (AR) offer new specific interfaces to promote the great diffusion of digital contents into industrial processes, thanks to flexible and robust applications, as well as cost-effective devices. However, the impact of AR applications on sustainability is still poorly explored in research. In this direction, this paper proposed an innovative approach to exploit MBD and introduce AR interfaces in the industry to support human intensive processes. Indeed, in those processes, the human contribution is still crucial to guaranteeing the expected product quality (e.g., quality inspection). The paper also analyzed how this new concept can benefit sustainability and define a set of metrics to assess the positive impact on sustainability, focusing on social aspects. © 2021 by the authors.

Keywords: Augmented reality , Humancentered design , Model-based design , Product development , Quality inspection , Social sustainability

The paper presents an interactive methodology partially inspired by Japanese Kaizen concept and applicable in several industrial contexts; its implementation starts when different circumstances arise, e.g. an analysis is carried out and some criticalities emerge. The proposed methodology aims at continuously improving processes under the environmental and economic perspectives. It is made up of eleven steps that leads the group from the issue identification to a new status, improved than the previous one, and improvable than the following. The case study describes an implementation of the methodology in an Italian medium company acting in the clothing sector, demonstrating its validity and efficacy. It was launched in the firm after energetic and environmental analyses outlined material, energy wastes and environmental impacts; they were tackled, and results show the methodology to be successful both from environmental and economic point of view.

Keywords: Energy analysis , Environmental sustainability , Kaizen , Life cycle assessment , Sustainable manufacturing , Waste reduction

The problem of packaging waste is deeply felt at international level, because each year hundreds of millions of tons of packaging are produced. While significant improvements have been made in the recycling of metal, wood, paper and cardboard packaging, plastic packaging still represents an open issue. The EU implemented regulatory actions to manage packaging and packaging waste by defining short-to-medium-term targets in terms of recycling rate. In such a context, the paper deals with an innovative composite material dedicated to the production of tertiary packaging, named NeoPalea. The proposed material is based on a combination of natural fibers and biodegradable biopolymers. It was prototyped to verify the performance as a potential substitute of the polymers currently used for packaging. The preliminary results obtained are encouraging.

Keywords: Biodegradable , Biopackaging , Bioplastic , Circular economy , Organic fiber , Recycling

The aim of this survey is to provide an overview about what efforts have been spent during the years by academia and industry make cheese packaging more sustainable. The analysis followed is based on a structured methodology that has general validity. A large pool of scientific papers (403) and patents (2272) was analysed and classified by identifying the exploited eco-strategies, the materials, the types of protected cheeses and by intersecting them to obtain more detailed classifications. The review is accompanied by graphs and tables to explain trends and to select the most representative papers or patents. Overall, the most followed strategies are improving cheese shelf life with active/vacuum or modified atmosphere packaging and using biodegradable packaging. The preferred materials are bioplastic with vegetal origin, followed by synthetic plastics. A great attention is paid to soft cheese and its requirements, such as the rapid perishability. Some discrepancies were found, mainly between the strategies covered by the papers and the patents and partly on the claimed materials. In particular, over the years, papers have become more interested in increasing cheese shelf life, especially by using active packaging, while patents remain strongly focused on biodegradable packaging. Finally, while not excluding biodegradability, it would seem that the development of cheese packaging could lean more towards active and smart (sensorized) ones in the future, even in industry.

Keywords: Cheese , Food packaging , Survey , Sustainability

The domestic consumptions are commonly claimed to be more than 60% of global GHG emissions and between 50 and 80% of total land, material and water use. In the last few years, a lot of methods and tools to estimate those impacts have been proposed in the literature and diffused on public administration portals (e.g. European Commissioner for the Environment) and on private Websites. However, an overall analysis of all the factors that contribute to the consumption of an entire home and the development of a support tool is still lacking. This paper discusses the main parameters to be considered for the analysis and the methods for calculating the environmental impacts, and it proposed a supported tool, in the form of an interactive configurator. It allows the user to enter the main data about her/his own home, the constituting components (e.g. appliances) and her/his habits and behaviours (i.e. ways of use), and then, after the processing, it provides the results, in terms of environmental impacts (kg of equivalent CO2) of the entire home and the constituting components, by also showing possible more sustainable alternatives.

Keywords: Configurator , Domestic impact , Interactive

This paper proposes a method of text mining to automatically retrieve knowledge from patents on how to recycle and reuse a waste. The main novelties are the introduction of a set of specific dependency patterns and the introduction of a partially revised TRIZ (Russian acronym for “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”) ontology to classify the retrieved information. The proposed dependency patterns were manually extracted from a sample patents pool about waste recycling and reuse. The classification of the information is based on different classes: (1) what transformations can be carried out on the waste, (2) what technologies can be used to carry out these transformations, (3) what products can be obtained by transforming the waste, (4) what functions can be carried out by the waste, (5) with which technologies, and (6) on which entities. An automatic implementation of the proposed method, involving the manual check of the retrieved results, was tested through a case study about wood chip recycling and reuse. Compared to the dependency patterns from the literature, the proposed ones allowed to retrieve 28 % more pertinent information. This results mainly depends by better ability of the proposed patterns to better discriminate the relevant sentences from which to extract information, compared to the other patterns (i.e. + 40 %). The automatic classification of the information was also correctly performed: in almost each class, precision and recall were higher than 60 % and on average equal to 90 %.

Keywords: Circular economy , Dependency patterns , Patents , Text mining

This paper critically reviewed 106 scientific papers proposing methods to enrich eco-assessment with failure determination and risk assessment. The provided research perspective is new and significantly different from the reviews in the literature which are mostly limited to analyse the environmental impacts of uncertainties and off-design functioning rather than the failures. The analysis, based on the contributions of the literature over more than 20 years, was carried out manually and allowed to identify and classify the application fields, the types of identifiable failures and the approaches used for their determination, for the analysis of their risk of occurrence and for their eco-assessment. The different classifications have also been intersected with each other and all the proposed approaches have been discussed in detail, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages in relation to eco-assessment. From the study emerged a growing and heterogeneous interest on the subject by the scientific community, and a certain independence of the analysed methods with respect to traditional approaches of both failure risk analysis and eco-assessment. Great attention of the methods about product functioning has been highlighted, in addition to the use of tests, simulations, FMEA (failure mode and effect analysis)-based approaches and knowledge databases to determine the failures, while statistical methods are preferred to support risks analysis and LCA (life cycle assessment) for environmental impact calculation. If, in the coming years, this argument also spreads in industry, the results provided by this review could be exploited as a first framework for practitioners.

Keywords: Failure determination , FMEA , Life cycle assessment (LCA) , Risk analysis

The paper discusses the application of Reinforcement Learning to the control of an onshore Wave Energy Converter (WEC). The proposed WEC features a simple and low-cost architecture. It is characterized by an oscillating floating rocker arm which moves a four bar linkage in the vertical plane. A mechanical rectifier, based on two one-way clutches and a multiplier gearbox, transforms the low speed oscillating motion of the four bar into a higher-speed unidirectional rotation of the electrical generator. The dynamic model of the WEC, based on multibody approach and Linear Wave Theory, is presented. Then a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm, a Q-learning method, is applied to dynamically adjust the generator speed-torque ratio as a function of the sea state. Simulation results show the effectiveness of this model-free adaptive control in tuning the system in order to maximize the generated power. Starting from a simple monochromatic model of the sea, the presented approach is verified according to sea conditions of increasing complexity, and finally to long term time series, obtained from measurements of real sea states in the considered geographical region. The tuning of the hyper-parameters of RL algorithm with respect to the speed of convergence and optimality of generated power is also discussed.

Keywords: Linear Wave Theory , Oscillating arm , Q-learning , Reinforcement Learning , WEC

The article stems from the main informative gaps of Design for Sustainable Behaviour and discusses the paramount role of a data-driven approach to inform design. The article stresses how quantitative data can address global sustainability, determine behaviours to modify, measure the impact of new learned sustainable behaviours as well as support the definition of behaviour change strategies, widening the spatial and temporal scales to communities and longitudinal studies and reducing unpredictable biases coming from tacit knowledge externalization and interpretation.

Keywords: data mining , human behaviour , sustainable design , user-centred design

Within the scope of Design for Sustainable Behaviour, the connection between behavioural change strategies and design idea generation has received limited attention. This paper highlights metaphorical thinking in product design to stimulate sustainable behaviour. In particular, the current study proposes a metaphor-based design method to guide designers on how to associate product features with behavioural and experiential cues through metaphors. We next report two design cases to evaluate this method. In the end, the shortcomings of current research and future developments are also discussed.

Keywords: design methodology , ecodesign , human behaviour , product design , sustainable design