The CO2PE!-initiative (cooperative effort on process emissions in manufacturing): International framwork for sustainable production

Manufacturing processes are responsible for a substantial part of the environmental impact of products but are still poorly documented in terms of their environmental footprint. The lack of thorough analysis of manufacturing processes has as consequence that optimization opportunities are often not recognized and that improved machine tool design in terms of ecological footprint has only been targeted for a few common processes. At the same time, a trend can be observed towards more energy intensive, unconventional processing techniques. In order to address these shortcomings, a worldwide consortium of universities and research institutes launched the CO2PE!\u96Initiative. This initiative has as objective to coordinate international efforts aiming to document and analyze the overall environmental impact for a wide range of available and emerging manufacturing processes with respect to direct and indirect emissions, and to provide guidelines to improve these processes. In addition to life cycle analysis, in depth process analysis also provides insight in achievable environmental impact reducing measures towards machine builders and eco-design recommendations for product developers. In this paper, the CO2PE!-Initiative is described along with an overview of case studies to illustrate how the CO2PE! methodology works