Assessing the environmental footprint of manufactured products: A survey of current literature

Environmental sustainability has become a high priority for many industries. While the growing concern to preserve our environment is critical to society and consumers, industries can also realize additional benefits of higher production efficiency and lower costs with this emphasis. Current research has focused on identifying carbon maps of supply chains by assessing the carbon footprint of products. Little work has been done on establishing methodologies that standardize these attempts. This paper surveys existing approaches, identifies commonly utilized methodologies and looks beyond carbon criteria for sustainable manufacturing. The challenges of establishing a comprehensive and standardized index based on all the manufacturing aspects, allowing companies to quickly assess the environmental footprint of their manufactured products, are debated. This exploratory paper also discusses possible approaches to alleviate shortcomings in current research in this area.