Economic & Environmental Issues in Materials Selection
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this course on evaluating the economic and environmental consequences of choosing one material over another across a product's life cycle. Lectures cover material choice concepts, fundamentals of engineering economics, manufacturing economics modeling methods, and life-cycle environmental evaluation. The material works through how selection decisions ripple through cost structures and environmental impact from raw material extraction to disposal, giving engineers a framework for weighing trade-offs rather than relying on intuition. As with other MIT OCW offerings, the course provides lecture notes and course materials for self-study at no cost, with no certificate attached. It suits students or working engineers in materials science who need tools for quantifying the downstream effects of a materials decision rather than just its immediate performance.