Calculating the cost of advanced manufacturing
For Tim Gutowski, advanced manufacturing is an opportunity not just to boost employment, but also to improve the environment. Gutowski heads MIT’s Environmentally Benign Manufacturing research group, which looks at the environmental costs and impacts associated with manufacturing traditional materials such as concrete and steel, as well as advanced and emerging technologies such as semiconductors, photovoltaics, and nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes. Gutowski’s group has spent more than a decade studying manufacturing’s environmental impacts through life-cycle analysis, a soup-to-nuts approach that calculates a product’s environmental costs throughout its lifetime: from extracting raw materials to powering the industrial processes to make the product and, finally, the impacts associated with consuming the product on a large scale. Researchers routinely perform life-cycle assessments for traditional industries such as automotive manufacturing and timber production. Such industries have been around for decades, and Gutowski says information on their manufacturing processes is relatively easy to obtain....