The impact of materials on sustainability

The US Environmental Protection Agency has calculated that over 292.4 million tons of municipal solid waste were generated in America alone in 2018. Of this total, just 94 million tons, about 32 percent, were recycled or composted. The remainder was sent to landfills. While much of municipal solid waste is food, landfills are also crowded with discarded consumer and industrial products. The end-of-life environmental impact of these products and increasing recycling rates are key areas of focus for the world’s manufacturers. There can be no doubt that material and process engineering provide important parts of the solution for combatting climate change.

According to professors David Cebon and Michael Ashby, assessing the overall sustainability of products over their entire lifespan is a complex task, requiring comprehensive data for the environmental performance of materials and manufacturing processes. “Because every product has unique environmental implications, engineers need to consider a wide range of sustainability issues, including environmental footprint, current and pending environmental regulations and the consequent supply risk. This requires comprehensive, high-quality data about materials, processes, coatings, substances, legislation, geo-political factors, and so on,” says Cebon, a mechanical engineering professor at Cambridge University.