Sustainable electronics product design and manufacturing: State of art review

ABSTRACT

The paper reviews the studies on sustainable electronics reported in the literature and determines opportunities through which the expansion of sustainable electronic products is possible. The sustainable growth of electronics products from product, process and material dimensions, and modelling of sustainable electronics were reviewed based on 57 papers from the literature. The review findings were used to identify the methods for improvement of the sustainability of electronic products. The study proposes a sustainability framework for electronic product design. The significant finding of the investigation reported in this review is that the deployment efforts of sustainability in electronics design and manufacturing are in the nascent stages and the attempts enhance the effectiveness of the implementation of sustainable manufacturing. The study investigates research studies from the viewpoint of implementing sustainable electronics product design and manufacturing. Besides, the deployment of the proposed framework to other organisations could also be validated. The findings of this literature investigation specified the need for enhancing the usefulness of sustainable electronics design and manufacturing approach. This study logically presents sustainable electronics product design and manufacturing under four critical perspectives. The study recognises research gaps and proposes methods for improvement.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• product design
• electronics manufacturing
• environmental design
• material selection
• process improvement
• modelling

Acknowledgments

This publication is an outcome of the R&D work undertaken project under the Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, being implemented by Digital India Corporation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

KJ Manjunatheshwara

K. J. Manjunatheshwara completed his PhD from Production Engineering Department of National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India. He received his Masters in Industrial Engineering from Production Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu. His area of research interest is sustainable manufacturing.

S Vinodh

S. Vinodh is an Associate Professor in Production Engineering Department of National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India. He completed his PhD from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India. He was a gold medalist in his undergraduate and post graduate studies. He has been awarded Highly Commended Paper award and Outstanding Paper Award by Emerald publishers, UK, for the year 2009 and 2011. He has published over 100 papers in international journals and in proceedings of the leading national and international conferences. His research interests include agile, lean and sustainable systems and multi-criteria decision making.