A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Additive Urban Manufacturing

Traditional manufacturing means that a product is mass-produced in distant countries and then shipped long distances to customers, leaving a very large carbon footprint. In this article, we present an approach to disrupt these traditional value chains and replace them with urban manufacturing (or local production) using three-dimensional (3D) printing technology. This approach allows products to be printed locally in an environmentally friendly way, rather than being manufactured far away and flown in. At the heart of this idea is a cloud-based Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) platform [1] that manages the entire process from online purchase to 3D printing, promoting sustainability and strengthening local economies.