Green Smart Manufacturing: Potentials and Limits Toward Industry 5.0

During the last decades, the progressive industrial digitalization provided companies with an increasing capability to improve the efficiency of processes and the quality products. In the recent frameworks of Industry 4.0, the pursuit of a greater efficiency in the use of material, energy and human resources, assumes increasing importance up to achieving the three goals -environmental, economic and social- of sustainability. Even if the issue is widely debated, the mechanisms by which these technologies are applied from a life cycle perspective, how they interact with each other and how they produce effects on sustainability remain to be explored. The article aims to contribute to fil this gap by investigating the role played by the so-called smart technologies, in a context of green manufacturing. The study, through a critical analysis of the most recent scientific literature, provides a systematization of the technologies and the solutions in the various phases of an ideal product life-cycle, highlighting their operating interactions and the potential effects in terms of sustainability, towards the future paradigm of Industry 5.0.