Translating environmental impacts into cleaner manufacturing practices: a structured methodology

The environmental impacts of manufacturing industries are increasingly recognized, with the production phase significantly contributing to the product’s life cycle impact. Integrating sustainability into manufacturing process design can help reduce these impacts, with environmental guidelines serving as key mechanisms for this integration. However, there is a lack of methodologies specifically dedicated to manufacturing process design, as most existing approaches focus on product development, lack a structured transformation of environmental assessments into actionable guidelines, and do not strongly involve key end-users. This study proposes a structured guide that follows a three-phase approach (Investigation, Transformation, Customization) providing a systematic method to identify and analyse key environmental challenges, extract relevant insights from environmental assessments, and translate them into actionable guidelines that are further adapted to process-specific constraints. Developed using the Design Research Methodology, the guide is informed by a literature review and expert evaluations. Its applicability is then evaluated in an industrial case study, focusing on phase 3, demonstrating its potential to generate tailored environmental guidelines. The findings emphasize the importance of modularity, customization, and alignment with existing processes to facilitate implementation. Future research should further evaluate the methodology across industries and explore digital integration to enhance usability and effectiveness.