This paper presents a systematic critical review of quantitative sustainability assessment studies on metal additive manufacturing (MAM) with a life cycle perspective. Potential benefits and present challenges of MAM are also discussed. MAM showed the potential to reduce overall environmental impacts and be more cost-effective for parts with complex designs, high value and low production volumes, particularly for automotive and aerospace components. However, currently, conventional manufacturing appears to have a better sustainability performance than MAM for simple parts in industrial applications. Overall, MAM technology is still in development, even if there have been optimizations and method consolidations.

本文从生命周期的角度对金属增材制造 (MAM) 的定量可持续性评估研究进行了系统的批判性回顾。还讨论了 MAM 的潜在好处和当前挑战。MAM 展示了减少总体环境影响的潜力，并且对于设计复杂、高价值和低产量的零件（特别是汽车和航空航天零件）来说更具成本效益。然而，目前，对于工业应用中的简单零件，传统制造似乎比 MAM 具有更好的可持续性表现。总体而言，MAM 技术仍处于开发阶段，尽管已经进行了优化和方法整合。