Special issue on “sustainable manufacturing”

Many issues are presently contributing to a greater attention to sustainability. Among them, we can consider the growing cost of energy, the pollution generated by industrial, transportation and civil activities, the shortages in the availability of strategic raw materials, the social concerns for the environment generated by large disasters, such as massive losses of oil in the sea or toxic emissions from industrial accidents, etc. The best known definition of sustainability goes back to the report published on 1987 by the Brundtland Commission, which introduced sustainable development as ‘. . . the development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Certainly, sustainability will be a main matter of attention for the future, under the social, political and industrial perspectives. Today, the aims of sustainable development are pursued with increasing world-wide attention by governments, industries as well as by research and educational institutions. Within the sustainable development concept, sustainable manufacturing represents an important area, given the importance of manufacturing in the modern societies and considering its big impact from the point of view of energy consumption, use of physical resources and emissions to the environment. As such, sustainable manufacturing practices can be considered important elements in the implementation of the great picture of sustainable development. Sustainable manufacturing can be defined as the set of technical and organisational solutions contributing to the development and implementation of innovative methods, practices and technologies, in the manufacturing field, for addressing the world-wide resources shortages, for mitigating the excess of environmental load and for enabling an environmentally benign life cycle of products. Traditionally, environment, society, and economy are considered the three main dimensions of sustainability. However, when focusing on sustainable manufacturing, the role of technology should also be considered, both for its importance as an integral component of the human way of living and for the role it can play in developing a sustainable approach to manufacturing. In this regard, research plays a strategic role in providing knowledge to innovate products, processes, production systems, industrial organisations and for introducing new business models for achieving sustainability in manufacturing. Science-based disciplines and, in particular, those referring to the area of industrial engineering can contribute to transform research results in innovative solutions for industry, which are compliant with the limits of the environment in an efficient way. In some recent editorials, Stephen Childe, the editor of PPC, has considered how the launch of the Gillette razor in 1903, with its disposable blade, was the starting point of the disposable era that created a business model in which the consumer would repeatedly buy supplies of manufactured items, and subsequently throw them away. A hundred years later the sustainability issues are making us question whether it is sustainable to dispose of items and replace them with new ones. Probably this model will not continue without receiving strong criticism. However, the change problem is not trivial. As Childe underlines, the pursuing of efficiency and efficacy was always made in factories, because manufacturers try to limit the use of resources for reducing their production costs, but, on the other side, the current business model for manufacturing pushes companies to shorten the life-cycles of products and to encourage customers to change to the latest product model and in this way, contributing to an useless waste of resources. On the contrary, a sustainability approach in manufacturing should not only minimise the waste of resources both internally to the factory and externally in the logistic of supply chains (thus improving sustainability from the beginning of the life of the product), but also consider the remaining parts of the product’s life-cycle (i.e. the operating life and the end of life). From a manufacturing point of view this means to consider all services related to the product operating life (i.e. maintenance, re-building, upgrading) and all processes and services related to the end of