Environmental Sustainability and Cost Evaluation for Stereolithography Additive Manufacturing Process

Additive manufacturing, also referred to as three-dimensional printing, has been implemented in a great number of industries, owning to its unique layer-by-layer production method. In addition to the growing public interest in developing additive manufacturing into one of the mainstream manufacturing approaches, increasing concerns related to environmental sustainability have been presented in multiple aspects such as energy consumption, emissions, material wastes, etc. To date, the majority of literature on environmental sustainability of additive manufacturing typically follow empirical methods and lack theoretical estimation and prediction capabilities. Therefore, there is an urgent need for analytical modeling on the environmental sustainability of additive manufacturing. In reality, reducing the adverse environmental impacts from additive manufacturing processes usually implies increasing production cost, as well as the life cycle cost. Subsequently, a joint study focusing on both environmental sustainability and cost evaluation will benefit the further development of sustainable additive manufacturing by theoretically estimating the environmental and economic performance of additive manufacturing process.