For Tim Gutowski, advanced manufacturing is an opportunity not just to boost employment, but also to improve the environment.

Gutowski heads MIT’s Environmentally Benign Manufacturing research group, which looks at the environmental cost and impact associated with manufacturing traditional materials (e.g., concrete and steel), as well as advanced technologies (semiconductor and photovoltaic) and nanomaterial (carbon nanotubes).

Gutowski’s group has spent more than a decade studying the effects that manufacturing has on the environment through life-cycle analysis. The group takes a soup-to-nuts approach and calculates a product’s environmental costs—the indirect and full range of costs—throughout its lifetime: from extracting raw materials to powering the industrial processes to make the product, and the impact associated with consuming the product on a large scale.

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