Identifying recommendations to promote remanufacturing in Europe

According to a recent study conducted by the European Remanufacturing Network – project, remanufacturing can contribute significantly to the wellbeing in Europe. The study defined three future scenarios of which the most ambitious transformation scenario foresees the potential to triple the volume of remanufacturing in Europe until 2030 up to about 100 billion Euro employing over half a million people. The transformation, however, will not happen by itself, but important promotion actions need to be taken by various stakeholders, like policy-makers, industrial companies, research and academic community as well as the general public. These stakeholders need to be supported and fed with recommendations to promote remanufacturing in Europe. The paper describes a process applied in the European Remanufacturing Network -project to identify and sort out central barriers that currently prevent large scale capitalisation of remanufacturing potential. The study was based on literature and industrial and expert participation in surveys and workshops. Respectively recommendations to extend remanufacturing were identified and the barriers and recommendations were mapped against each other to assess the sufficiency of the recommendations. After prioritization, finally targeted recommendations for the key stakeholders were defined and reported in this paper: nine for policy makers, four for research & education, one multi-stakeholder recommendation and seven recommendations for business and industry.