This award supports an international workshop, to be held in Germany at the Technical University of Berlin September 29 through October 1. The workshop is a "Global Conference on Sustainable Product Development and Life-Cycle Engineering" and is co-sponsored by TU Berlin and the German Deutsch Forshungsgemeinschaft. The objectives of the conference are to assess the state-of-the -art of Environmentally Benign Design and Manufacturing as compared to the previous NSF sponsored WTEC study, to assess the gap between research and applications in the field; to develop recommendations for moving towards sustainable products and enterprises; and to identify specific areas of potential collaboration between the EU and the US research teams. The workshop will include keynote talks, breakout sessions for discussion of five topical areas, and roundtable sessions across themes to generate synthesis across the topical areas and provide networking opportunities for the US and EU researchers. Funding includes support for participants from the US who have been conducting research in EBDM.
The broader impacts of this award include the impact that identifying the barriers and creating research opportunties to remove these barriers that EBDM will have on the future creation of sustainable products. This will directly affect materials and resource use, and will provide industry with the tools necessary to make decisions that better address environmental impacts through advances in total life cycle assessment. The Workshop will also address education issues so that current teaching and experiential modules can be shared, and new educational needs identified. The impact for potential research also crossed numerous disciplines - mechanical engineering, industrial engineering, environmental engineering, materials science, and economics.
