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Making urban factories more sustainable through circularity design

Due to the continuous evolution of the urban populations, environmental impacts relative to consumption and demand for products inside urban areas have reached alarming levels. In addition, industrial revolutions and globalization offered cost reduction opportunities to factories such as centralizing manufacturing activities in emerging countries. More damages are caused to the environnement as a result to these wider logistics networks. To reduce such impacts and integrate factories inside urban areas, sustainable manufacturing concepts of urban factories have been deployed. Urban factories are defined as factories located inside urban areas that utilize urban properties and proximity to resources and stakeholders to create value in a sustainable way. To enhance their environmental performance, urban factories have deployed circular economy strategies throughout their value chains. Due to the lack of frameworks and methodologies for the design of circularity for urban factories, the present poster proposes a step-by-step circularity design methodology based on the principles of systematic design. Each step of the proposed methodology is supported by a set of tools and templates such as best practices databases, proposals' evaluation sheet, giga-map... To illustrate this, the present poster presents results from a case study on an urban factory in Grenoble that manufactures arcade machines. The application led to the development of 7 different proposals set to close loops and reduce consumption of virgin materials and energy flows. Additionally, the evaluation of the proposals resulted in the design of a final proposal in which the 3 most prior proposals have been merged. A life cycle assessment study has shown that this final proposal is expected to help reduce climate change impacts by 43.3% and resources impacts by 10.7%. In addition, the final cost of manufacturing the arcade machines is expected to be reduced by 47%.

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