RE: My love-hate relationship with my PhD Part 2 and my independent research on 3DPrinting
Yes, you need to do a deep dive into LCA and make sure it is region specific, or , normalized for input electricity generation type basket. One thing that I have noticed about 3D printing is the high electricity amounts needed. BUT, this needs to be baselined to a component that is traditionally manufactured. You could find a small specialist part studio and ask them to study their parts that are made (without 3D printing) and then 3D print some and check both LCA results. I guess, this result will be highly part type specific. So you need to figure that out too for a more generalist conclusion. Or just throw out the notion of even trying to be generalist. Anyway, that's like my 2 minute thoughts on this. I guess the goal is using less energy and promoting decentralized specialist manufacturing to make the decentralized economy stronger.
Looks like we have someone here who do know about LCA!
This is in fact an important issue in the world of LCA. Will be writing a post on that :-) Watch out for it :-)