SCOPE: Workshop: Research and Education Needs in Sustainable Manufacturing: Atlanta, GA; July 2016

Overview: The manufacturing sector is the engine for economic, particularly because growth in manufacturing drives additional activity in other sectors. However, in recent years, US manufa-cturing has dwindled and has faced numerous challenges. Sustainability has generated a new wave of manufacturing innovation and could become the vehicle to increase manufacturing competitiveness. To enable advanced manufacturing innovation in sustainable manufacturing, it must concurrently be addressed at the product, process and systems levels. Implementing more sustainable manufacturing practices requires the adoption of a closed-loop material flow strategy, where embedded value from products is recovered at end-of-life (EOL) to increase product reuse, component remanufacturing and material recycling. In this respect many chall-enges exists with respect to technology capabilities for end-of-life non-disruptive product disas-sembly and formulate recommendations for core capability development, component remanu-facturing and end-of-life processing of different material types. There is a need for better tools that can enable modeling, analysis and prediction of total lifecycle product performance. In addition, the education and workforce development needs in sustainable manufacturing have been repeatedly emphasized by industry leaders. Intellectual Merit: A series of roadmapping workshops have helped identify challenges and technology gaps to implementing more sustainable manufacturing practices. However, the focus specifically on identifying tools, enabling technologies and best practices to recover embo-died value (energy and materials) in EOL products to reduce energy consumption and virgin material used particularly in energy-intensive manufacturing sectors has not received much attention. Identifying separation technologies, disassembly techniques and simplifying comple-xity of product designs present significant scientific and engineering challenges. The proposed workshop aims to serve as a platform to gather, discuss and synthesize inputs from experts to address these specific issues in sustainable manufacturing. The outcomes of the workshop can be used nationwide to initiate a national agenda and a roadmap for research and education to operationalize sustainable manufacturing practices. Broader Impacts: The sustainable manufacturing technical community will be consulted to identify current and emerging challenges and opportunities to enable more cost-effective, ener-gy and material-efficient manufacturing practices. The findings will be used to develop a road-map to initiate concerted research, education and workforce development efforts to address key challenges and technology gaps in sustainable manufacturing. The workshop will provide a platform for faculty from a variety of universities engaged in sustainable manufacturing-related research to also identify collaboration opportunities for other research endeavors in the future. The event and community that will be created can help enhance and improve scientific, engineering and educational activities.