A Systematic Literature Review on Additive Manufacturing in the Context of Circular Economy

Stavros Ponis, Eleni Aretoulaki, Theodoros Nikolaos Maroutas, George Plakas and Konstantina Dimogiorgi
Additional contact information
Stavros Ponis: School of Mechanical Engineering, National Technical University Athens, 157 73 Athens, Greece
Eleni Aretoulaki: School of Mechanical Engineering, National Technical University Athens, 157 73 Athens, Greece
Theodoros Nikolaos Maroutas: School of Mechanical Engineering, National Technical University Athens, 157 73 Athens, Greece
George Plakas: School of Mechanical Engineering, National Technical University Athens, 157 73 Athens, Greece
Konstantina Dimogiorgi: School of Mechanical Engineering, National Technical University Athens, 157 73 Athens, Greece

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-28

Abstract: Additive Manufacturing (AM) is, undoubtedly, one of the most promising and potentially disruptive technologies of the Industry 4.0 era, able to transform the traditional manufacturing paradigm and fuel the generally accepted and necessary shift towards the conceptualisation, design and adoption of sustainable and circular business models. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the structure of the scientific field residing in the intersection of AM and Circular Economy (CE), by determining the status of its current state-of-the-art, proposing an initial typology in an attempt to contribute to the existing efforts of structuring this rather novice research area and pinpointing research gaps where more focus should be put, and highlighting areas with a significant potential for added-value future research. To that end, a sample of 206 papers, published from 2014 to 2020, was retrieved from the Scopus and Google Scholar databases. After studying and critically evaluating their content in full, contributions were classified into six thematic categories, providing a first typology of the current literature, followed by a detailed section highlighting and taxonomizing existing review studies. Next, contributions of the three categories of interest are discussed followed by a critical evaluation of the study’s contribution, inherent limitations and future research potential.

Keywords: additive manufacturing; circular economy; sustainable manufacturing; Industry 4.0; 3D printing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/11/6007/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/11/6007/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:11:p:6007-:d:562844

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().