Environmental Burden Analyzer for Machine Tool Operations and Its Application

The manufacturing technologies have been evolving according to development of evaluation methods for quality, productivity and cost. In spite of the need for ecomanufacturing, the relationship between manufacturing technologies and environmental burdens has not been yet revealed. Machining is a major manufacturing activity, hence an analyzer developed evables to estimate the environmental burden due to machine tool operations. The machine tool operations has a big potential influence regarding envirnmental burden, and then the envirnmental burden analyzer is developed based on LCA (life cycle assessment) (SETAC, 1999).