Resource Conservative Manufacturing : New Generation of Manufacturing

Sammanfattning: The question of resource scarcity and emerging pressure of environmentallegislations have put the manufacturing industry with a new challenge. On theone side, there is a huge population that demands a large quantity ofcommodities, on the other side, these demands have to be met by minimumresources and with permissible pollution that the earth’s ecosystem can handle.In this situation, technologic breakthrough that can offer alternative resourceshas become essential. Unfortunately, breakthroughs do not follow any rule ofthumb and while waiting for a miracle, the manufacturing industry has to findways to conserve resources. Within this research the anatomy of a large body ofknowledge has been performed to find the best available practices for resourceconservation. Critical review of the research revealed that none of the availablesolutions are compatible with the level of resource conservation desired by themanufacturing industry or by society. It has also been discovered that a largegap exists between the solutions perceived by the scientists and theapplicability of those solutions. Through careful evaluation of the state-of-theart,the research presented in this thesis introduced a solution of maximizingresource conservation i.e., material, energy and value added, as used inmanufacturing. The solutions emerged from the novel concept named asResource Conservative Manufacturing, which is built upon the concept ofMultiple Lifecycle of product. Unlike other research work, the researchdocumented in this thesis started with the identification of the problem andfrom which a ‘wish to do’ list was drawn. The seriousness of the problem andpotential of adopting the proposed concept has been justified with concreteinformation. A great number of arguments have been presented to show theexisting gaps in the research and from that, a set of solutions to conserveresources has been proposed. Finally, one of the prime hypotheses concerningclosed loop supply chain has been validated through the system dynamicsmodeling and simulation.