Editorial:
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Special Issue on Design and Manufacturing Toward Sustainability
Yasushi Umeda
Published:January 5, 2009
"Sustainability," a concept leading the 21st Century, calls for the manufacturing industry and its products to achieve sustainability.
This issue treats such aspects as CO2 emission and global warming, depletion of natural resources and fossil fuel, and emission of toxic and hazardous substances. Sustainability requires the manufacturing industry to make at least two major changes while maintaining or increasing competitiveness and added product value:
1. Lifecycle thinking requiring manufacturers to design, evaluate, and manage the complete product lifecycle, including use and end-of-life stages.
2. Minimizing everything in the product lifecycle, including products, material and energy use, manufacturing and inverse manufacturing systems, and logistics the consummate lean lifecycle.
In this sense, sustainable manufacturing is an extension of current advances in manufacturing technologies, but with an emphasis on wider, holistic applications.
This special issue brings together manuscripts discussing vital viewpoints on design and manufacturing moving toward sustainability.
The first two papers by Kishita et al. and Matsumoto et al. advocate sustainable resource circulation systems. Papers 3 to 6 by Masui, Sakao et al., Fargnoli, and Fukushige et al. discuss environmentally conscious design. Papers 7 and 8 by Narita et al. and Kondoh et al. propose evaluations of environmental awareness of manufacturing systems. The last three papers by Komoto et al., Takata et al., and Hiraoka et al. discuss postsales activities– collection, and reuse–indispensable to sustainable manufacturing.
We thank the authors for their most interesting contributions to this special issue and the reviewers and editors for their invaluable effort, and hope you, our discriminating readers, will begin discussing and implementing ideas and applications for moving the manufacturing industry toward sustainability.
Cite this article as:Y. Umeda, “Special Issue on Design and Manufacturing Toward Sustainability,” Int. J. Automation Technol., Vol.3 No.1, pp. 1-2, 2009.Data files:
