Traditional manufacturing of short life cycle products frequently leads to overproduction and much unsold waste products. This is due to excessive demand forecasts made to satisfy quick product launch and responsive fulfilment, usually achieved through make-to-stock production using injection moulding. This leads to unnecessary wastes that burden on the environment while, due to usual local production, the CO2 emissions totally burden on the region of interest, which in most cases is China. This work investigates the impact, in terms of sustainability, of adopting distributed manufacturing through Three-Dimensional Printing (3DP) compared to localized manufacturing through injection moulding, in the production of mobile case covers.