Choosing products for decentralized manufacturing: Utilizing recycled 3D printing filament in India and Germany

Abstract

As additive manufacturing technologies become widely available as desktop 3D printers, opportunities for decentralized manufacturing arise. The goal of the 3-CYCLE project is to produce plastic filament for 3D printing by recycling waste plastics and thus moving towards sustainable decentralized manufacturing. Leading to the question which product should be produced within the paradigm of sustainable distributed manufacturing using 3D printing with locally recycled filament. Therefore, this work proposes a framework to rate potential products regarding fabrication with recycled filament. A hierarchical criteria-system is developed covering important properties and constraints linked to the 3-CYCLE process and its characteristics. A weighting process to assign different importance levels to the proposed criteria-system by experts is created. Subsequently, a decision-making process is developed to rank in accordance of the assessed alternatives to the criteria-system. The multi-attribute process includes decision-making techniques (TOPSIS, WSM and WPM), an aggregation step and a verification approach. In a case study, ten products are compared with the developed approach. Resulting into four different rankings, differentiating between India, Germany and the inclusion of educational aspects.