Rold presents the Smartfab 2030 project

On March 1, 2023, the SmartFab2030 project was concluded, co-financed by Regione Lombardia in the context of the Tech Fast Lombardia call for tenders using the funds of the 2014-2020 REGIONAL OPERATIVE PROGRAM OBJECTIVE “INVESTMENTS IN FAVOR OF GROWTH AND EMPLOYMENT” (co-financed with the ERDF) – PRIORITY AXIS I – STRENGTHENING RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND INNOVATION, Action I.1.b.1.2 – Support for the economic valorisation of innovation through experimentation and the adoption of innovative solutions in processes, products and in organizational formulas, as well as through the financing of the industrialization of research results.

The project saw the active involvement of various ROLD units, which worked in a synergistic and complementary way to develop a platform capable of acquiring the information necessary to conduct an analysis of the environmental impacts of products as quickly and automatically as possible made. The development of this platform was carried out with the methodological support of Demetra Società Cooperativa Sociale Onlus, a company that has been supporting companies in LCA analyzes and product certifications in the environmental field for years.

Why did we think about developing SmartFab2030?

Today small and medium-sized enterprises receive more and more requests from the leaders of the supply chain, from regulatory bodies, from the financial world and from end customers concerning the definition of the environmental impacts of their products. In order to provide this data, companies often have to invest in terms of personnel and time to dedicate. Between 70% and 80%* of this effort is intended for the early stages: what data to enter, where it is stored within the company, etc.

SmartFab2030 intends to provide concrete support to SMEs for the analysis of the environmental impacts of their production processes, without there being a direct effort to go and find the real data of the manufacturing processes, but simply by acquiring them directly from the machines, from the management systems present in company etc.

After an initial phase of analysis of company processes and a phase of customization of data acquisition processes, the final result is an indicator that expresses the greenhouse gas emissions expressed in terms of total CO2eq of the analyzed product, with a detailed report describes the impact of each sub-component of the product itself.

Source: Jamal Hussain Miah et al., A framework for increasing the availability of life cycle inventory data based on the role of multinational companies, Int J Life Cycle Assess (2018) 23:1744–1760 – DOI 10.1007/s11367-017-1391 -y