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Sustainable manufacturing

Anyone who’s ever covered a wall with sticky notes to clearly map all of the steps in a process knows how valuable that exercise can be. It can streamline workflows, increase efficiency, and improve the overall quality of the end result. That’s also true for sustainable manufacturing, thanks to an innovative international standard created by a public-private team led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The standard helps manufacturers “map” the critically important environmental aspects of their processes, leading to significant improvements in sustainability while keeping a product’s life cycle low-cost and efficient. Learn more about sustainable manufacturing standards related to ASTM.

The Research

Projects & Programs

Multiscale structure and dynamics in advanced technological materials

Ongoing
New technologies increasingly harness materials phenomena that operate across many length-scales: e.g., in selective gas adsorption, additive manufacturing, new alloy designs, or advanced concretes. To overcome technology barriers, it is no longer sufficient just to characterize the materials

Smart Manufacturing Systems Design and Analysis Program

Ongoing
Smart Manufacturing has the potential to fundamentally change how products are designed, manufactured, supplied, used, remanufactured and eventually retired. Current smart manufacturing implementations are mostly at the plant level, and use information technology, sensor networks, computerized

Agri-Food Manufacturing System and Supply Chain Integration

Ongoing
Objective: Deploy new standards and reference data supporting agri-food manufacturing systems to enable industry to more efficiently and cost effectively produce food-based products of higher quality and with improved food safety. Technical Idea: Today, food producers face many challenges include

Additional Resources Links

News

2025 MBE & QIF Summit Call for Presentations Open

Spotlight: A Q&A With NIST Engineer Ashley Hartwell

Save the Date - 2025 MBE & QIF Summit April 15-17, 2025