Abstract
Recently, life cycle assessment (LCA) has been attracted attention in the manufacturing fields. Although some consumption devices have been designed taking LCA into consideration, to date there have been few reports on machine tools that do so. In this study, a desktop-size multifunctional machine tool is assembled for use as a cell production system, and we use LCA to estimate the environmental impact. The LCA results demonstrate that the use of smaller machine tools is an effective way to lower the environmental impact in small-parts manufacturing fields.
