IBM Patents a System That Picks the Greenest Way to Build Each Part

By Patentlyze Team · Updated Jul 24, 2026

Before a factory makes a single cut or print, IBM's patented system wants to run the math on every possible manufacturing method and pick the one that wastes the least material and energy, part by part.

What IBM's sustainability scoring actually does

Imagine you're assembling a complex product, like a piece of industrial equipment, and it has dozens of different parts. Some parts might be cheapest to stamp out of metal, while others could be 3D-printed with far less waste. Right now, factories usually pick one process for everything, or rely on engineers to make those calls by hand. IBM's patent describes a computer system that would do that comparison automatically.

You give the system a product design, and it breaks the design into its individual components. For each component, it evaluates all the manufacturing options available, comparing how much material each process wastes and how much electricity it consumes. It then assigns each option a sustainability score and picks the winner for that specific part.

The end result is a customized manufacturing plan where each part is built using whichever method is cleanest overall, not just whichever is most convenient or cheapest up front.

How the system segments, scores, and selects processes

The patent describes a computer-implemented workflow that sits between the design phase and the factory floor. When a product design is fed into the system, it uses analysis to segment the design into individual components, essentially breaking a finished product into its buildable pieces.

For each component, the system then runs a comparative evaluation across different manufacturing process types. Those could include subtractive methods like CNC machining (which carves away material), additive methods like 3D printing (which builds up material), or traditional casting and stamping. The evaluation weighs two key variables:

• Material wastage: how much raw material is discarded or unusable after the process
• Power consumption: how much electricity or energy the process requires to complete

Those two factors feed into a sustainability score calculated for each process-component pair. The system then selects the highest-scoring process for each component and routes each part to the appropriate manufacturing method. The patent claims this selection-and-manufacture loop covers the full production run, not just the planning stage.

What this means for industrial sustainability goals

Manufacturers face growing pressure, from regulators, customers, and their own sustainability targets, to cut both energy use and material waste. Today, that optimization usually happens manually, is applied inconsistently, or is ignored entirely once production is underway. A system that embeds those trade-offs into the planning step, before anything is built, could make a real difference at scale, especially for companies producing complex multi-part products.

For IBM, which sells consulting and software to large industrial clients, this patent fits a broader push into AI-assisted operations. Whether this becomes a standalone product or gets folded into existing manufacturing software platforms isn't clear from the filing, but the underlying idea, score environmental impact the same way you score cost or speed, is one that factory planners would recognize immediately as useful.

Editorial commentary on a publicly published patent application. Not legal advice.