A comprehensive and interdisciplinary perspective on sustainable manufacturing towards sustainable life cycles

For achieving sustainable manufacturing it may not be enough to only focus on manufacturing processes, systems and products as separate entities for optimization, but it may require analyzing and engineering their broader and possibly unobvious interconnections. Whereas new technologies can play a significant role in resource efficiency, sustainability improvement and life cycle engineering, other factors like consumer behavior, global cost structures and even geopolitical issues play an important role for achieving sustainable manufacturing and sustainable life cycle development. This requires interdisciplinary research and analysis approaches. Concepts like Socio-Technical Systems (STS), Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and systems engineering can help uncover the multiple impacting factors to be considered in comprehensive sustainability analysis and engineering.