Analysis Model of Resource Consumption and Environmental Impact for Manufacturing Process

Manufacturing process is a main phase inducing resource consumption and environmental pollution during product life cycle. Because of the variety of processes and complexity of their environmental impact mechanism, there is still lack of an efficient method to evaluate the environmental impact of product manufacturing processes. Each process may be viewed as input-process-output (IPO) units in the product manufacturing procedure. On the basis of process IPO models, a new analysis method is presented to aggregate process level resource consumption and environmental impact so as to form a combined input-output model for manufacturing process. The model form permits identification of opportunities for reducing environment impacts by the reduction analysis of resource consumption. A case study of valve body manufacturing process is discussed, which shows that the method is practical.