Additive manufacturing from the sustainability perspective: proposal for a self-assessment tool

Emergent technologies and additive manufacturing have a significant role in shaping the future of manufacturing, enabling companies to produce complex products and parts in a more efficient and sustainable way. However, companies are struggling to identify and achieve the full potential of the technology from a sustainability perspective. The purpose of this paper is to develop a checklist to assess the sustainability performance of additive manufacturing adoption and exploitation, based on secondary data from the academic literature, technical reports, and company cases. Results rely on the identification of critical sustainability aspects for additive manufacturing and key performance indicators.