Sustainable 3D Printing: Design Opportunities and Research Perspectives

As 3D Printing process, technologies and tools are rapidly becoming pervasive and used both in industrial and in non-industrial contexts, the risk to have new unsustainable printing processes and production’s behaviours is high and, potentially, can led to the increasing of environmental emergency (unsustainable growth). On the other hand, Design for Sustainability works, since late 80’s, on the mitigation of production’s environmental foot-print and, recently, on the development of socio-technical systems and distributed hybrid solutions empowering both environmental aspects and socio-economic ones. This paper investigates the new concept of Sustainable 3D Printing using recent Design for Sustainability’s research theories and design approaches, in order to evaluate, and later describes, promising design opportunities and research perspectives that can be used and taken into account, simultaneously, by designers, researchers, entrepreneurs and policymakers to support the societal transition toward sustainable ways of design, production and consumption.