A Prioritisation Guide for More Sustainable Manufacturing

Historically, manufacturing companies prioritised factors such as cost, lead-times, and quality over consideration of sustainability. As we deepen our understanding of the impact that
human activities have on the environment, industries need to find ways to integrate environmental accountability into their definition of success.

Ongoing debates claim that the concept of sustainability and its assessment is vague. Companies struggle with understanding which processes they should prioritise for integration of environmental accountability. They necessitate a methodology to aid decision-making. For that reason, our investigation focused on defining a prioritisation guide to help manufacturing engineers identify areas to prioritise de-carbonisation efforts on, based on existing sources of data.

Project “Butterfly” has been funded by the UK government to address this aim. The project consortium includes some of the UK's leading manufacturing companies, operating across a broad range of manufacturing sectors, including Food & Drink (Moy Park), Automotive (Nissan), Aerospace and Defence (BAE, Meggitt, Leonardo, GKN) and Technology (Accenture, Intellium AI), linking Industry with Academic (University of Sheffield - Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre - AMRC, that led the research).