Date of Award

Fall 2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Program/Concentration

Mechanical Engineering

Committee Director

Han P. Bao

Committee Member

Keejoo Lee

Committee Member

Sandeep Kumar

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E56 B65 2010

Abstract

Significant increase in industrialization is a leading cause for the depletion of global resources and changes in the earth's atmosphere due to global warming. There has been a major concern for the manufacturing industry to deal with the above problems and this had led the researchers to focus on the area of sustainability. Sustainable development aims for the future, which is characterized by the interaction of the economic, environment and society. To enable the manufacturing companies to measure sustainability performance, developing the metrics for sustainability is critical. The purpose of this thesis is to review the indicators published in the literature, to synthesize them into a comprehensive indicator set and to validate this concise set of indicators with actual products. This thesis elaborates on the selection method of the indicators and provides a major case study to confirm the soundness of the selection process.

A wide range of indicators for the three dimensions of sustainability are collected from research papers, governmental agencies with a stake in sustainability such as the U.N. and the E.P.A., large corporations and industrial companies. These indicators are tested with the products in Environmental Product Declaration to form a new set of indicators which will be more suitable for manufacturing products.

The case study is based on CRT & LCD desktop computer displays manufactured by Sony Corporation, and the measure of sustainability of these products is determined using target plots and other means of comparison.

The contribution of this thesis is the identification of a more appropriate set of indicators to qualify sustainable manufacturing products. The work carried on in this thesis could be extended in the future to cover a wider range of industrial products.

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DOI

10.25777/e9vg-jx78

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