The 6R framework and the sustainable manufacturing paradigm: an automatic analysis and clustering of scientific literature

The number of scientific papers in the field of sustainable manufacturing shows a strong growth in the last 20 years. Despite this huge number of publications, still a clear statement of the meaning of sustainable manufacturing is missing. To a certain extent, its rationale can indirectly be identified by referring to the 6R framework, as it is an axiomatic identification of the true nature of sustainable manufacturing. That is, by recognizing the pursuing of one or more of the Reduce-Recycle-Reuse-Recover-Redesign-Remanufacture principles allows one to identify any manufacturing action as sustainable. The paper discusses this axiom, trying to speculate if this classification is still valid or other approaches may be envisaged that overcome this dated framework. By exploiting SCOPUS® databases as a source of data, and combining of engineering knowledge and natural language processing algorithms as tools, the resulting cluster of main keywords were used to check the validity of the 6R framework. The present paper starts from the measurement of the distribution of the scientific papers allocated onto the 6Rs dimensions by using both author keywords and automatically extracted multiword from texts. Then it measures how clear is the distribution of the scientific papers among the 6R dimensions recognized as classes using a state of the art clustering algorithm. This work is still exploratory and preliminary to an upcoming investigation of alternative criteria or frameworks that could provide different meaningful perspectives by providing clear rules for assessing the affinity of manufacturing approaches to one or more 6R framework’s dimensions.