Strategies to overcome barriers to LCA adoption in additive manufacturing

Abstract

As additive manufacturing advances within Industry 4.0, concerns over its environmental impact have motivated this study to investigate the application of life cycle assessment (LCA) in additive manufacturing operations. While LCA offers significant benefits, its adoption is hindered by multiple barriers; however, existing research lacks a thorough discussion and analysis of these challenges and effective strategies to overcome them, highlighting a critical gap in the literature. Thus, the primary objective of this study is to scrutinize strategies for overcoming key barriers to LCA adoption in additive manufacturing within developed economies. To achieve this, a multi-method approach was employed, consisting of four sequential phases incorporating a comprehensive literature review and analysis techniques—analytical hierarchy process to examine barriers and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution to analyze strategies in a fuzzy environment. The research findings revealed twenty-seven barriers, systematically analyzed and ranked into five main categories in descending order: support barriers, data-related barriers, resource barriers, methodology barriers, and complexity barriers. Among the seventeen set strategic solutions, ‘commitment and support from top management’ emerged as the most prominent, followed by ‘research study on LCA training and manuals’ and ‘pre-processing of information for LCA study’. Hence, the study bridges the identified research gap by providing actionable insights that empower policymakers and industry leaders to develop targeted mitigation strategies and enhance the sustainability performance of additive manufacturing operations. It can serve as an invaluable reference, as it is the first to explore this topic.