Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing and Life Cycle Analysis: A State-of-the-Art Survey

Research on developing new methodologies on environmentally conscious manufacturing and way of reducing environmental impacts on product design was started over two decades ago. Environmentally conscious manufacturing has become a challenge to the environment and to the society itself, enforced primarily by government regulations and the customer expectation on environmental issues. In both industry and academics, there is a sizable following for environmental-related issues which are aimed at finding answers to the problems that arise in this newly emerged area. Problems are widespread including the ones related to the life cycle of products, disassembly, material recovery, and remanufacturing and pollution prevention. Only very few researchers have concentrated on ecofriendly products. This paper investigates the literature by classifying more than 200 published references into four categories, viz., design for environment checklist, environmentally conscious manufacturing, life cycle analysis, and material selection.