Multi-Perspective Eco-Efficiency Assessment to Foster Sustainability in Plastic Parts Production

The eco-efficiency assessment is a powerful metric to introduce two components of sustainability assessment in the industrial companies' decisions making: the concurrent consideration of economic and environmental performance. The application of the eco-efficiency concept and of the normative documents is not an easy task, mainly because there are myriad environmental related indicator to consider and acquire. This barrier is higher in the realm of plastic injection molding, where each mold is unique, requiring a recurrent effort of data retrieving for such one-of-a-kind molds. To overcome this barrier, an integrated framework to support the eco-efficiency calculation on a life cycle perspective for a specific type of products, injection molds, is proposed in this chapter. It retrieves a small but representative selected set of eco-efficiency performance indicators. A tool was developed to apply the proposed framework and the results of its application to four real industrial case studies is discussed.