Sustainability in some places is a detail, something for the PR people and occasional campaigns. In other companies, countries, and industries however, there is a remarkable awakening going on. Companies are increasingly making sustainability part and parcel of business as a whole. Sustainability goals are becoming part of personal goals, recurring tasks, and bonuses for executives. And for those businesses, sustainability is not just a detail, a kind of business variant of a vitamin gummy meant to easily obscure negative behavior with a good signal to one’s self or others. Rather, it is a business discipline.

Transmission housing manufactured using indirect 3D printing. Credit: Deutsche Bahn AG /Dominic Dupont

Like all disciplines, it takes discipline, hard work, and perseverance. And a lot of sustainability topics are hard, sometimes unknowable, and hard to quantify. One thing that is hard to measure and then report on is CO₂ emissions and footprint. What to count, how, when to stop counting, and how to quantify, it is all difficult. For a company as vast and complex as Deutsche Bahn (DB), a 330,000 employee firm with 5,000 rail stations and $40 billion in revenue, measuring emissions could seem like an insurmountable task.

Now the company is turning to 3D Spark to measure its CO₂ footprint for on-demand spare parts manufacturing. That will let DB keep to its corporate goals and requirements more easily. For 3D Spark, this offering is a way to differentiate itself from other additive platforms and move into more digital manufacturing tooling. Furthermore, such a program gives it a lot of visibility in DB as a company. If the firm does well in the on-demand area, the fact that it has a “dashboard” like functionality making data visible to business leaders should see it expand its business. At the same time, this kind of reporting stuff often gets thrown on central corporate budgets, so they could conceivably have this contract for ages without losing it.

DB’s Arvid Eirich, stated,

“Implementing 3D Spark’s CO₂ platform at Deutsche Bahn has provided significant benefits by enhancing our ability to ease sustainability-driven decisions. The tool allows a solid, real-time CO₂ reporting based on high-quality estimations, which supports our commitment to reducing environmental impact while optimizing efficiency. The 3D Spark suite facilitates an automated assessment of carbon emissions, enhances our decision-making processes for production through a data-driven approach. It greatly supports in selecting the most suitable 3D printing technology for each part, allowing us to focus on innovation and growth.”

‍DB wanted to automatically calculate the emissions of every additive part. It wanted to also look at technology choice and cost. By making this visible, they wanted to make decisions with more insight as well. And of course they wanted to do so in compliance with the latest standards. 3D Spark can complete these calculations for lots of different materials, post-processing scenarios, and production processes. The company then wants to make this information easy to access and digest.

3D Spark offers a game-changing approach to CO₂ calculation and reporting, integrating seamlessly into existing manufacturing workflows to deliver immediate, actionable insights without any extra efforts needed. DB says that reporting was available in real time, and the costs were reduced.

The Additive Manufacturing market is not an island. We need our tools to be able to communicate with the rest of a firm’s infrastructure. At the same time, if we do this exceedingly well, we can get integrated into workflows, corporate structures, and budgets. But, we can take our tools and make them very useable in digital manufacturing other than additive. And we can then perhaps leverage them to broader or deeper tools that are relevant to many elements of a business. Rather than making tools for an island, making tools for the empire is a far better tactic now, as 3D Spark shows us here.