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.
Rights
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DOI
10.25777/e9vg-jx78
Recommended Citation
Bodapati, Sundeep.
"Development of Sustainability Indicators for Products and Processes"
(2010). Master of Science (MS), Thesis, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Old Dominion University, DOI: 10.25777/e9vg-jx78
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/mae_etds/438