Increasing resilience of material supply by decentral urban factories and secondary raw materials

Current production processes are frequently dependent on global supply chains for raw materials and prefabricated inputs. With rising political and global risks, these supply networks are threatened, which leads to a reduction of supply chain resilience. At the same time, urban areas are currently one of the main consumers of products and waste material generators. The raw material sourcing for this consumption commonly takes place in globally connected supply chains due to economy of scale effects. Therefore, cities are especially vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. A recent development which could reduce this vulnerability is the installation of urban factories among other urban production concepts, which can be symbiotically embedded into the urban metabolism to utilize the locally available (waste) materials. This, however, is hampered by the smaller production scale of decentralized urban production facilities, limited knowledge and challenges about the urban material flows and their characteristics. Against this background, we introduce a new factory type which is placed between the primary and secondary industrial sector: An urban secondary raw material factory which utilizes local waste material and other urban material flows for the extraction and refinement of secondary raw materials to supply production sites in its surrounding environment. To enable this small-to medium-scale factory type, the application of new production technologies plays a crucial role. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach for matching relevant potential waste streams to different technologies for waste-to-resource refinement. The applicability of the method for identification and evaluation of suitable technologies regarding their potential to be located in urban environments is demonstrated for plastic and metallic materials. Subsequently, key challenges and characteristics of the new factory type are summarized. With the introduction of this new factory type, the lack of scale effects in urban symbiotic networks is expected to be reduced. In conclusion, challenges such as the data-based management of symbiotic relationships among manufacturing companies are highlighted as still relevant in decentral value chains

Urban Factories – Establishing resource-efficiency in production logistics systems in cities

Cities are a hotspot for resource consumption and related impacts. This is induced, among others, by transportation, production and the use of products and services. Industrial production is commonly associated with negative impacts, e.g. on the environment or traffic. Through positive integration of production sites into urban surroundings, negative impacts can be eliminated, and even positive impacts achieved. To reach a higher degree of integration of different utilizations in cities, resource-efficiency, new conceptual approaches are required for urban factories, city authorities and further stakeholders. For this purpose, a methodology has been developed that describes the planning processes of the involved disciplines and their interdependencies concerning content and timing. Subsequently, an analysis of Urban Factories within a reference framework called the factory-city-system and its key resources is carried out in an exemplary case study. Measures to enhance resource-efficiency are thus dentified, exemplarily described and examined regarding their potential to raise resource-efficiency

Defining the “Positive Impact” of socio-technical systems for absolute sustainability: a literature review based on the identification of system design principles and management functions

Socio-technical systems represent complex interactions of humans with ecological, social and economic systems. A system’s design and its operations determine whether its impact is “negative”, “neutral/zero” or “positive” over the system life cycle with regard to its contribution to sustainable development. But coping with exceeded planetary boundaries and social challenges requires more than “net-zero” approaches to achieve biosphere resilience and healthy societies. While negative and zero impacts are widely studied, the term “positive impact” has just recently gained importance to describe the outcome of design, planning, operational, organizational or engineering processes. Various case studies, reviews and conceptual proposals exist—mostly applied in a specific context—but a clear definition is not yet detectable. Based on a review of existing literature, this paper: (i) analyzes current perceptions of negative, zero and positive impacts of socio-technical systems on absolute sustainability, (ii) summarizes the current state of knowledge on positive impact concepts for sustainable development, (iii) identifies relevant socio-technical system design principles for positive impacts on biosphere, society and economy, (iv) derives management functions and organizational prerequisites within socio-technical systems to enable positive impacts, (v) proposes a guiding framework and a definition for “positive impact of socio-technical systems for absolute sustainability”, and (vi) discusses briefly potential applications and further research demand. This review intends to synthesize existing knowledge from an industrial and engineering design perspective, and delivers an overview on the subject from a global sustainability level to the operational level. The derived insights provide a basis for method development, system design processes and new business models