Evaluating the environmental and financial performance of additive manufacturing at scale in the consumer goods industry

As corporate sustainability commitments and environmental regulations intensify, additive manufacturing users must balance the technology's maturing economic value with its application- and process-dependent environmental impact. With limited methods to navigate this multi-dimensional variability at scale, additive manufacturing stakeholders face challenges when making growth and investment decisions. To bridge this gap, this study applies system modeling methodologies to a case study of an additive manufacturing service unit in the sporting goods industry aiming to improve its product portfolio's economic and environmental impacts and scale its capabilities. A tradespace model compares the value of additive manufacturing to injection molding across product characteristics and lifecycle decisions, and a flexible design analysis evaluates additive manufacturing scaling strategies, considering market and technology uncertainties. The tradespace analysis reveals that additive manufacturing reduces product environmental footprint by 95 % and unit cost by 93 % for 1-to-20-part production volumes compared to injection molding, while injection molding lowers environmental footprint by 72 % and unit cost by 56 % for 100-to-50,000-part production volumes compared to additive manufacturing. This analysis also suggests that additive manufacturing's economic and environmental value increases when located in geographies with low-carbon footprint energy and when manufacturing very low production quantities or small parts that maximize build capacity. The flexible design analysis indicates that expanding internal production capacity to a larger facility with renewable power, once higher demand is confirmed, can reduce part environmental footprint by up to 49 % and increase Net Present Value by more than 600 % compared to maintaining current operations that leverage external service bureaus. The results demonstrate the potential of these system modeling methodologies in integrating financial and environmental impact assessments at the company level for strategic scaling decisions. Future model developments are recommended to incorporate additive manufacturing's unique design impacts on the product lifecycle, more nuance in the impact analyses, and the social component of the technology's sustainability.