Date of Award

6-2013

Degree Name

MS in Industrial Engineering

Department/Program

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Advisor

Lizabeth Schlemer

Abstract

Becoming sustainable is no longer an option. Current industry methods will not be able to support the necessary changes our growing society demands. In order to keep up with ever increasing demands industry will be aimed toward making major system changes toward a fully sustainable model. As of right now only basic sustainability actions have been put in place. Industry needs to make a strategic change toward resilient systems with an end goal of evolving into fully biomimic systems. This thesis covers a brief history of production leading to the Industrial Revolution which created a need for increased sustainability efforts. The Environmental Movement was started in hopes of creating these changes and is extensively studied in this thesis logically leading up to industry’s current sustainable actions. A discussion of widely applied sustainability methods helps to describe a need for a framework that will help move industry toward increased resiliency. The culmination of this thesis is the creation of a three-piece framework for change, called RISE (Reshaping Industry Sustainably Efforts). This framework is the product of extensive research into current sustainability efforts, collected survey results, and the need to increase understanding of resilience and biomimicry from an applied system perspective.

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