Embodied energy of manufacturing supply chains

The focus of sustainable manufacturing has been to integrate environmental requirements into product development due to increasing environmental requirements from both customers and regulations. Manufacturers can monitor and improve the environmental performance of their products by assessing environmental impacts for all product life cycle stages. Nevertheless, the complexity of such assessment can be a challenge as it is a time and cost consuming process which involves many factors and stakeholders throughout the life cycle stages. The manufacturing supply chain can be seen as another alternative which is relatively simple for a manufacturer to start the implementation of sustainable manufacturing. As a consequence, this research investigates the embodied energy of a product life cycle that is manufactured under different manufacturing supply chains using life cycle assessment. A roofing system is chosen as a case study, in which its current supply chains have been assessed and compared with 10 different supply chain scenarios. Three associated factors of the supply chain are varied across those scenarios which are manufacturing location, travel distance and transportation type. The results are presented in two fundamental units of the embodied energy analysis which are mega joules equivalent and kilogram of carbon dioxide equivalent. (C) 2011 CIRP.