The Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) built a set of per-part carbon and embodied-energy models and used them to compare traditional plastic injection molding against Photocentric's LCD additive manufacturing process, cradle-to-gate, using a mass-produced PCB spacer supplied by Essentra as the worked example. The results were published as Kirkwood et al., "Integrating models for calculating component sustainability metrics" (TESConf2024, DOI 10.57996/cran.ceres-2624).
The numbers
Produced by injection molding, that spacer generates 8.809 gCO2e per part. Produced on JENI, 1.322 gCO2e — an 85% reduction. Almost all of it is material, not energy: process materials fall from 7.819 to 1.158 gCO2e per part, process energy from 0.743 to 0.132. Around nine tenths of the saving sits in the material alone.
Why the saving is mostly material
The reason is waste. Moulding consumes considerably more material than the part weighs — sprue, runners, start-up, and purging scrap. Especially for high-variation molding, the waste fraction is significant. JENI, by contrast, packs platforms densely with minimal support structure, and uncured resin drained from platforms returns straight to the vat. Process scrap is low by design.
And 85% is the conservative figure. Cradle-to-gate stops at the storage gate, so nothing is counted for machining and heat-treating a hardened steel mold, for amortizing that tool across the batch, or for parts made speculatively to meet a minimum order quantity and later written off. Every one of those falls on the molding side. The real-world gap is wider than the modelled one.
Materials: what they are made from
We formulate our own photopolymers, so the feedstock question is in our control if our materials are used. A growing share of the monomers and oligomers we work with can be synthesized from low-value bio-waste — food waste, agricultural residues, and similar streams — instead of fossil-derived petrochemicals. Because we make both the material and the machine, we can qualify those chemistries against real production parts on JENI rather than validating them in isolation.
The material example today is Durable DL902 Plant-Based, an ABS-like engineering resin formulated with 52% bio-based raw material. The value of a material like this is not just how it prints but whether the finished part survives being used. Post-cured, DL902 reaches an ultimate tensile strength of 46 MPa and elongates 37% before it breaks. That is the toughness and crack resistance a snap-fit or a connector actually needs, rather than the brittleness photopolymers are still assumed to have by some with experience of making SLA prototypes years ago.
Process efficiency: LCD's inherent advantage
LCD screens are by nature lower in energy use than other additive manufacturing methods. One exposure cures an entire layer, rather than a laser or jet tracing it point by point. This is why process energy on JENI is 0.132 gCO2e per part versus 0.743 for injection molding — a fraction of the energy, even before accounting for the tool-making energy that molding requires.
JENI has built-in carbon tracking of material and the power used for each job, so the figures above are measured per job rather than estimated. This means every production run has a verifiable carbon footprint, not a modelled estimate.
End of life: the hard question
This is the genuinely hard part of any photopolymer story, and we would rather address it directly than gloss over it. A cured photopolymer is a thermoset — the polymer network is chemically crosslinked, so unlike a thermoplastic it cannot be melted and reformed, and conventional mechanical recycling does not apply. We are working on three routes.
First, keeping material out of the waste stream to begin with. JENI packs platforms densely with minimal support structure, and uncured resin drained from platforms returns straight to the vat, so process scrap is low by design.
Second, energy recovery. Photopolymers have a high calorific value and combust cleanly in an energy-from-waste facility, so a part at end of life returns usable energy rather than occupying landfill.
Third, and the most interesting long term, designing recyclability in by creating chemistries with cleavable bonds that allow a cured network to be broken back down into reusable oligomers under mild conditions.
The bigger picture
Sustainability in manufacturing is not just about energy efficiency. It is about eliminating waste at every stage — from the material that goes into the process, to the tooling that is never needed, to the parts that are never produced speculatively, to the inventory that is never held. JENI's 85% CO2 reduction is a measured figure from an independent study, and it is the conservative version. The real-world gap is wider.
Learn more about how JENI works as injection molding without tooling and the full cost comparison between JENI and injection molding.
