Primary-Data Carbon Accounting for Photopolymer Additive Manufacturing: Energy, Materials, Yield and Allocation

Carbon accounting for photopolymer additive manufacturing is easily distorted when printer electricity is measured carefully but resin production, failed builds, supports, washing solvent, post-cure, consumables and yield are represented by assumptions. Primary-data accounting should therefore begin with the product system and functional unit, not with a single machine power reading. This review develops an inventory architecture for vat-photopolymer workflows in which material inflows, recovered and discarded resin, support mass, wash-media losses, electricity, post-cure energy, ancillary equipment and output yield are measured by process stage. Secondary life-cycle datasets remain necessary for upstream resin, electricity and transport burdens, but their role is kept distinct from measured factory data. The framework treats allocation, cut-off rules, reuse credits, failed parts and solvent recovery as explicit scenario choices rather than hidden arithmetic. Published sustainability assessments of vat-photopolymer components show why these choices can change apparent contributions materially. The central conclusion is that a carbon result is only as transferable as its inventory boundary. A defensible claim reports the measured foreground data, secondary background models, yield denominator, allocation rules and uncertainty together, so that another analyst can reconstruct the result and test alternative assumptions.

ER-271 · Version 0.2.