Quantitative sustainability assessment of metal additive manufacturing: A systematic review

This paper presents a systematic critical review of quantitative sustainability assessment studies on metal additive manufacturing (MAM) with a life cycle perspective. Potential benefits and present challenges of MAM are also discussed. MAM showed the potential to reduce overall environmental impacts and be more cost-effective for parts with complex designs, high value and low production volumes, particularly for automotive and aerospace components. However, currently, conventional manufacturing appears to have a better sustainability performance than MAM for simple parts in industrial applications. Overall, MAM technology is still in development, even if there have been optimizations and method consolidations.