ENVIRONMENTALLY ORIENTED JOINING AND ASSEMBLY TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONTEXT OF SUSTAINABLE MANUFACTURING

Abstract

The paper provides a review of environmentally oriented joining and assembly technologies as a crucial engineering lever for implementing sustainable manufacturing and circular design principles. It is demonstrated that decisions on the type of joints – detachable mechanical fasteners, permanent joints, hybrid solutions, and controlled-release (reversible) bonding – largely determine product repairability, the feasibility of modular component replacement, the resource efficiency of maintenance operations, and the practicality of end-of-life disassembly and material separation. From a lifecycle perspective, the study highlights how joining solutions affect the formation of “clean” material streams suitable for reuse and recycling, and why conventional permanent joints (including highly durable adhesive bonds and encapsulation/ potting compounds) often become a barrier to circularity by forcing destructive disassembly, mixing materials, and reducing the value of secondary raw materials. Particular attention is paid to current trends in “greening” adhesive technologies: reducing toxicity and emissions, avoiding hazardous constituents, lowering the energy intensity of curing processes, and developing debonding-on-demand adhesive systems that combine high in-service performance with predictable separation during repair or recycling stages. The review emphasizes that the industrial viability of such systems depends not only on adhesion strength, but also on long-term reliability, ageing resistance, process repeatability, and scalability under high-throughput manufacturing conditions. The paper discusses representative application contexts where environmental requirements strongly influence assembly choices: automotive manufacturing (modular architectures and multi-material lightweight structures), electronics (repairability and reduction of e-waste), and prosthetics/medical devices (biocompatible polymers and the need to align environmental solutions with strict human safety constraints). As a result, the paper consolidates key criteria for selecting joining and assembly technologies in sustainable manufacturing, and identifies major knowledge gaps requiring further research. These include the lack of standardized, jointlevel metrics for disassembly performance and repairability, limited availability of quantitative environmental comparison models (LCA/LCI) for alternative joining strategies, and the shortage of long-term experimental datasets addressing controlled debonding behaviour of reversible adhesive systems under real-life ageing conditions. The review concludes that the most promising direction lies in integrated strategies combining modular design, detachable joints, hybrid joining, and reversible bonding, while explicitly incorporating repair and end-of-life scenarios at early design stages.