Manufacturing is all about making things out of materials.

In most cases, the final product is made up of a combination of raw materials and pre-manufactured items.

Whatever the items and materials are, all of them will ultimately have come from natural resources.

But in addition to these physical items that you can see and touch, there are countless other resources used to provide the energy and system of operation that allows you to carry out the manufacturing process.

Let's look at a specific example.

An example

Just say you were asked to build a solid timber chest of drawers for a client. Select each of the links below to see the breakdown of resources and materials that might be used up in the process of manufacturing the product:

• Materials and items contained in the finished product
  
  
• Other 'consumable' items used in the manufacturing process
  
  
• 'Process' energy used directly in the manufacturing process
  
  
• 'Non-process' energy used in the activities that support the manufacturing

You can see from the lists above that we are already getting a very big collection of materials and energy sources, and we haven't even started on the resources used by administrative and sales staff. And it doesn't stop there - once the drawers are finished, there are many other resources needed to get it from the factory to the store or warehouse, and finally to the purchaser's home.

But for the purposes of our example, let's stay with the immediate materials and energy sources needed to make the product, and trace each of them back to the basic resources that came from the natural environment.