In a bit of a roundabout way, an article recently published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) News Office says what we’ve been saying all along: metalcasting might be the most efficient way to make your complex engineered components.

We tend to drive this point home from the perspective of your bottom line—the metalcasting process might save you some money if you convert your components from a less efficient process. The MIT article looks at various manufacturing processes strictly from the perspective of their efficiency of energy and materials use. And the results are favorable to metalcasters.

According to the article, “new manufacturing systems are anywhere from 1,000 to one million times bigger consumers of energy, per pound of output, than more traditional industries.” Then, the story goes on to include the metalcasting industry more explicitly in this group of traditional processes. “In short, pound for pound, making microchips uses up orders of magnitude more energy than making manhole covers.”

Manhole covers? Why, those are cast metal! The MIT guys then ponder what it means to “make comparisons between such widely disparate processes as metal casting [sic] and chip making” and determine that the newer industries should take a look at the more traditional metalcasters and try to learn from them.

And, as we’ve said so many times before, we think you should take a look at the efficiency of the more traditional metalcasters, as well.