Potentials For Improvement Of Resource Efficiency And Environmental Impact In Printed Circuit Board Manufacturing

Sustainability Development Goals require sustainable production and innovation in green industrialization.Manufacturing companies' pursuit of sustainable production promotes waste reduction by source.A manufacturing company can help optimize resource use and cost savings by identifying hotspots of environmental and economic impacts within and along the production chain.Increasing resource consumption is linked to the continuous growth of resource-intensive manufacturing,which contributes to CO2 emissions.CO2 emission mitigation is on the agenda for green industrialization.Therefore,resource use management and CO2 emission mitigation are major factors affecting the optimization of manufacturing processes.To address the issues of sustainable resource use management,Material Flow Cost Accounting(MFCA)has been developed and applied as an effective environmental management tool.The accounts of products and losses are overrated by weight or volume in MFCA.However,it is incompatible with Printed Circuit Board(PCB)manufacturing,because of industry characteristics that primary inputs and products are measured by area.Thus,this research aims to modify the MFCA-based calculation by applying it in a case study of a PCB manufacturing company.Material and cost re-distribution is carried out along the PCB production and manufacturing process.In addition,to measure the pressure embodied in Scope 1-3,especially extended to supply chain,the hybrid Process Analysis-Input-Output Analysis(PA-IOA)has been applied and adopted widely.However,few input-output model was applied to micro levels(i.e.organizational)comparing to macro and mesco levels(i.e.national and city-wide scale).This case study integrates a top-down Environmentally-Extended Input-Output Analysis(EEIOA)and a bottom-up process analysis MFCA to calculate the total CO2 emissions along the upstream supply chain for potentials of carbon burden reduction.Based on MFCA,this case study systematically established several linear cost calculation models along the production process for capturing the actual waste flows as well as performing cost-benefit analysis.Recognition of previously ignored losses offered the incentive to find appropriate indicators to conduct cost-benefit analysis on hotspots for losses.To subsequently extend the system boundary to create green value chain by determining carbon emissions burden,MFCA-based cost allocation results provide support for Environmentally-Extended Input-Output Analysis(EEIOA).Process-wide material and energy inputs are viewed as final demand for EEIO model to measure the embodied environmental impact.Under MFCA,loss identification and analysis indicated that machining and wiring are the necessities and priorities of process optimization for resource efficiency improvement measures;regarding improvement for potentials of solid waste management,company should take priority in reducing resource input by machining and for waste water by electronic plating.At the sector level,inputs from "Other Metals" and "Chemical Products" are hotspots;process-wide results show electronic plating,lamination,sheet cutting,and wiring are the priorities for process optimization in order to improve climate mitigation.Comprehensively,wiring is the first priority and necessity of creating sustainable manufacturing and achieving environment-economy sustainability.Accordingly,based on loss analysis,this study also proposes the specific process improvement measurement for improvable potentials:(1)The distance between boreholes need to be spaced more rationally and the fixing control should be improved in the machining process;(2)and pattern processing used by wiring process should be applied instead of panel processing.