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.

This article describes the main recommendations and the process applied in the ERN project to define them. The main content of the work described consists of analysing the remanufacturing barriers and identifying measures to overcome them.

Research approach
The methodology for the definition of the recommendations and the action plan is described in Fig. 1. In the used methodology the "The Voice of Industry" is emphasised. The industrial voice comes from more than 600 people through several channels and activities performed in the ERN project, including; In the used methodology results from previous work in the ERN project were used. The basis for the recommendations identification process is the objective and vision for remanufacturing in Europe which has been set up in the market study performed by the ERN project. The ERN results also included the analysis of remanufacturing business models, processes and design for remanufacturing, using business cases from industry. Additionally literature regarding  It is also important to understand that in addition to companies active in remanufacturing, other organizations and actors can contribute to the success of remanufacturing. Thus the different stakeholders and key actors were identified.
The consolidation of barriers and recommendations from different sources resulted in two "long lists", one for the identified barriers and another for the identified recommendations. To make the information more usable both of the long lists were analysed to structure them into three categories, dividing the barriers and recommendations accordingly to the key topics of ERN project (business models, design, and processes). Also the overlapping barriers and recommendations in each category were aggregated together to a smaller number; thus making it more easy to assess them.
In each phase the intermediate results were given to the project consortium partners for review, comments, corrections and additions. The final industrial assessment was performed as part of an industrial workshop in Glasgow, September 2016. In the workshop the actions and recommendations were also mapped to the barriers and the timeline and importance of the actions were assessed by the workshop participants. Finally, for each recommendation the targeted stakeholder was identified. In this phase it was found clearer to categorize the recommendations for each stakeholder, instead of the original categorization according to ERN topics. The reorganization also supports dissemination of the recommendations to the target groups. Figure 1 illustrates the methodology for recommendations definition.
The used methodology contains the following steps: & Setting European industrial objectives for recommendations The objectives were derived from the ERN project market study. The most ambitious "Transformation" scenario was selected as the basis.
& Identifying remanufacturing barriers, gaps, challenges and development needed.
The step involved the collection of information from literature and from previous ERN results in the field of business models, processes and design. Industrial viewpoints were included from case studies. The resulted "long list" of barriers was analysed, structured and aggregated to the main barriers.

& Identification of Key Actors and Stakeholders
The stakeholders which could contribute to the adoption of remanufacturing were identified and the key actors were chosen. The recommendations are targeted to these key stakeholders.
& Identifying recommendations for remanufacturing The step involved the collection of information from previous work and from a large number of other sources and workshops.
Recommendations presented for circular economy in general were reviewed. The high number of derived recommendations was analysed, structured and aggregated for a set which could be easier offered for validation and assessment. The aggregated and structured recommendations were allocated to key actors and stakeholders & Mapping and Industrial Assessment: The recommendations were mapped to barriers. As a result the recommendations having the highest impact and the barriers having insufficient recommendations were recognized. An industrial workshop was arranged for additional barriers and recommendations. Remanufacturing experts listed recommendations which they considered most important.
The prioritization coming from different assessment methods and sources was consolidated to identify the most important recommendations. Additional recommendations for barriers with missing recommendations were brought in by remanufacturing experts.

& Targeted Recommendations
Summarising and formulation of the final targeted recommendations.

Objectives and timeline
In the ERN Remanufacturing Future Market Report (ERN market report) the following scenarios for remanufacturing in Europe in 2030 were defined: Base case: assumes approximate current growth rates up to 2030 for the remanufacturing intensive industry sectors. An increased understanding of remanufacturing value both from manufacturers and from consumers supports continuing growth resisting some of the downward pressure put on the wider manufacturing industry in Europe. This does not incorporate any step-change in the remanufacturing industry, rather just positive organic growth for the industry. Base Case scenario would yield a production value of €46 billion, employing some 300,000 people and averting 11 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. This is a little over a 50% increase in remanufacturing from today's levels. Stretch case: a scenario where the value of remanufacturing from the perspectives of creating highly skill jobs and environmental benefits is well understood by policy makers, industry and consumers alike. Remanufacturing is thus incorporated as an important strategy within a wider circular economy. Appropriate policies and promotional activities to foster growth in the remanufacturing industry are adopted resulting in a higher intensity of remanufacturing as a proportion of manufacturing. The Stretch scenario yields more than double today's levels with a value of €73 billion, employing 450,000 and averting 16 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Transformation case: a scenario where remanufacturing becomes a key strategic pillar for the EU, taking much of the investment and effort away from lower level waste hierarchy activities (Recycle, Recovery and Disposal) and focus on remanufacturing and reuse activities. This would be done based on the belief that remanufacturing and reuse would create significant numbers of highly skilled jobs, ability to avert waste to landfill and associated greenhouse gas emissions. The significant effort results in substantially increased intensity of remanufacturing as a proportion of manufacturing by 2030. In the Transformation scenario by 2030, the value of European remanufacturing would be close to €100 billion employing over half a million people and averting some 21 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
It is assessed that the Base scenario follows the current development, without any additional actions. Thus the recommendations defined in the exercise described aim to exceed the base scenario, up to the Stretch scenario or even the Transformation scenario. The period under review extends to 2030.

Information sources
The identification of barriers for Remanufacturing started with the analysis of ERN Project documentation [1], including market analysis and case studies. In the main ERN viewpoints (business models, processes and design) the barriers from each of them were identified. Remanufacturing challenges, obstacles and barriers were also collected from the presentations and discussions in the industrial workshops conducted. In remanufacturing and circular economy literature, there is an abundant supply of different types of remanufacturing challenges, obstacles and difficulties available. However, when collecting this type of information from literature you soon realise that many of the identified barriers are of the same type, thus overlapping to some degree. The sources [1,[3][4][5][6] have been used.

Industrial voice
The ERN Market Study was carried out as a questionnaire to industrial recipients, representing companies with some link to remanufacturing. The answers were received from more than 200 industrial partners. The survey included the question: "How important are the following barriers for remanufacturing to your company? (1=Not important, 4=Very important)". Figure 2 shows the industrial view of importance of remanufacturing barriers as percentage of respondents. It can be Fig. 2 Importance of remanufacturing barriers in ERN market study seen that the core volume, availability and quality were found very or quite important for most of the respondents. Also the customer recognition was seen as of high importance.

Identified unstructured remanufacturing barriers
Analysing the information sources from previous research and from ERN results generated an unstructured list of almost 300 barriers which were partly overlapping and at different levels of detail. The large number and different levels of expression made the list difficult to manage. Thus the information had to be structured and reduced to a more manageable list. For the purpose a categorization according to viewpoints used in ERN was applied, namely Business Models, Design for Remanufacturing and Remanufacturing Process. The three categories where further structured into subcategories. Table 1 shows the structuring scheme that was used.

Organizing barriers to structures
For the practical structuration, a MS Excel-tool ® was used to manage all the original barriers, to keep up their sources and to perform the organizing into selected structures. Mainly it was quite straightforward to place the barriers into the structure but in some cases a barrier was set in two different groups. Details of the distribution of barriers can be seen in Fig. 3 below. It should be noted that the numbers do not directly express the importance of each barrier. Partly this is because the originally listed barriers were at different levels of scope and detail. Also, for example the lower number of barriers for Design for Remanufacturing (DfRem in the figure) is coming mainly from the novelty of this subject. A reason why more product types are not remanufactured is that their design does not facilitate remanufacturing [7]. In addition, the design problems are likely to be more severe for independent remanufacturers that do not have the full product knowledge and needs to perform much reverse engineering in order to understand how to perform a proper remanufacturing of the product.

Aggregation of barriers
After the barriers were put into their categories the number was reduced, by removing overlaps, merging and reformulating barriers with nearly similar content. Some generalization was also made. By doing this the reference to the original source was lost. After the aggregation process the nearly 300 barriers were transformed into a list of 74 structured remanufacturing barriers.

Identification of key actors and stakeholders
Remanufacturing requires many different competences and capabilities. Thus, collaboration between different companies along the supply chain is typically needed to perform remanufacturing processes. There are different collaboration forms, depending on the remanufacturing "network manager" (OEM, contracted, independent), product type, location etc. To progress in remanufacturing, however, not only the companies already active in manufacturing and remanufacturing are needed. The whole product lifecycle should be involved, thus taking remanufacturing option into account in product design, sales and lifecycle services (including end of life). By doing so, information about the product being remanufactured can be shared instead of getting lost along the way and reverse engineered at the remanufacturing stage, see [8]. The role of government regulation is often mentioned in Circular economy literature, but also different types of support organizations (like industry associations, research & education), even different communities can influence the future development.
In many business fields the role and activity of customers is increasing and companies need to be more aware of customer needs and preferences. The customers may be either enterprises or consumers. Perhaps remanufacturing could be increased through better customer awareness and Four categories of Key Actors in remanufacturing were selected and agreed on in the ERN project. The grouping presented in Table 2 was used. The main categories of Key Actors have been further structured into more detailed subcategories.

Identified recommendations
For the first identification of unstructured recommendations for remanufacturing, an analogous process as in the identification of barriers was used: first the "long list" of recommendations was identified using different sources, then their categories were identified and finally they were aggregated into the categories according to ERN topics (business models, process, design).

Identified unstructured remanufacturing recommendations
Analysing information sources resulted in an unstructured list of 120 recommendations. As for barriers, the information had to be structured and reduced to a more manageable list.

Structuration and aggregation
In the first phase the same structure scheme as for barriers was used, namely the categories; Business Models, Design for remanufacturing and Process. In addition to the ERN three main structures, a fourth category "Other" was added for recommendations that are more general or do not otherwise fit within the ERN categories. Also the same methodology and tools as for barriers were used to structure the recommendations. In some cases the text describing and motivating the recommendation was quite long. A laborious task was undertaken to remove overlapping recommendations and to aggregate and merge them into a more manageable list. During the aggregation process also each recommendation was mapped to one or several actors. The list of key actors was used. After the aggregation process a more manageable structured list of 67 recommendations for remanufacturing was reached. Figure 4 shows the distribution of recommendations per Actor.

Organizing aggregated recommendation to structures
The MS Excel-tool ® as mentioned in "Identifying remanufacturing barriers" section was used to analyse how the aggregated recommendations fall into the used structure (business model, processes and design). Details of the distribution of recommendations can be seen in Fig. 5 below. Even if the numbers indicate which areas have been highlighted in the source material, they do not directly tell the importance of each aggregated recommendation. One reason is again the different level of scope and detail of different recommendations.

Analysing aggregated recommendation and actors
A further analysis was conducted to check if a specific group of Actors can be seen as responsible for certain categories of recommendations. Figure 6 shows the number of recommendations per actor and . From the graph it can be seen that the actor group Business Enterprises and Industries are seen as responsible for developing remanufacturing processes, while Policy Makers are seen as responsible for developing the business opportunities for remanufacturing. However the distinction is not very clear.

Mapping and industrial assessment of recommendations
Three different methods for selecting the most important recommendations were used.
1. Desktop analysis. Combining and cross checking recommendations and barriers.
2. Industrial assessment done in workshops 3. A collection of ERN expert opinions and ratings of the most important recommendations. The ERN experts also contributed with their knowledge for additional recommendations for barriers with missing recommendations.
As a final step the three approaches were combined to identify the main targeted recommendations.

Desktop analysis
The result from Fig. 3 (number of barriers per ERN grouping category) and Fig. 6 (number of recommendations per ERN grouping category) were compared. A fairy good correlation between the two data sets could be noticed. The areas perceived as problematic, with many barriers, also received attention in the form of a large number of recommendations. The conclusion is that the structure of categories was well chosen.
A further analysis was done by mapping recommendations to barriers, which barrier is removed with which recommendation or action. The analysis may give two kinds of useful information: 1) Even after the structuring and aggregation the number of barriers (74) and recommendations (67) was quite high to compare each individual recommendation to each barrier. Thus the first approach was to perform the mapping inside the categories: business model, design and processes. This means that the recommendations related to business models were compared with the barriers related to business models, etc. Soon after starting the analysis it was found that this kind of analysis alone does not give the correct view on the impact of the actions on the barriers. Clearly some recommendations could affect different types of barriers. Thus it was decided not to restrict the desktop mapping inside the categories but to cross check also between the other categories. In the analysis all the structured recommendations were reviewed to identify the barriers they affect. As a whole, about 100 links were identified of which about one fourth were across the three categories: for example, some recommendations relating to barriers related to business models also influence on barriers related to processes.
The graph in Fig. 7 shows the "top" recommendations based on number of linked barriers. This means that each of these recommendations helps to overcome several barriers. The listed recommendations remove or decrease at least 3 different barriers.
Another objective was to identify barriers for which there were not sufficient recommendations. Based on the analysis three potentially missing subjects were identified. Firstly, there are tensions and insufficient collaboration between OEMs and third party remanufacturers. Secondly, safety & security in remanufacturing needs to be ensured. And thirdly, there are insufficient resources for remanufacturing. To tackle these barriers, ERN experts contributed with their knowledge for additional recommendations for these barriers with missing recommendations. Thus, to remove tensions and to improve collaboration between OEMs and third party remanufacturers, Business Enterprises and Industries are recommended to collaborate in design, manufacturing and remanufacturing to create sustainable solutions. To improve resources for remanufacturing, Educators and Researchers should improve cross-disciplinary teaching and education for remanufacturing and help business to incorporate remanufacturing. In addition, Business Enterprises and Industries should stimulate investment in remanufacturing industry by promotion to third party investors. Unfortunately no recommendations were found to ensure safety and security in remanufacturing, so this barrier would need to be considered further in some other projects.

Industrial recommendations assessment workshop
An industrial workshop was arranged for the assessment purpose. It was attended by about 25 representatives from industry and research community. The participants were asked to review the identified barriers and recommendations in groups of 4-5 persons. As a result the workshop formulated, in all, ten new recommendations. In addition, each working group indicated the five most important recommendations from the aggregated list of recommendations. The new recommendations were compared with the list of structured recommendations. A correspondence was found for most of the given recommendations.

Expert opinions and ratings of the most important recommendations
The ERN experts were asked to select at most ten key recommendations to mitigate barriers for remanufacturing in Europe. The partners were also asked to place the recommendation with the highest priority at the top. The answers were collected from all partners. The following graph, Fig. 8, shows the recommendations receiving the most attention (at least 3 persons have selected the recommendation in their list of ten key representations). Additionally the graph shows the cumulative priority presented as the sum of the priorities given by partners. From the graph it can be concluded that there is a fairly good correspondence between the number of supporting persons and cumulative priority. The most important recommendation was found to be the removal of the regulatory barriers to remanufacturing and in the next the focus was on teaching and education for remanufacturing. Also international collaborative research for remanufacturing was seen important. The ERN experts mainly come from research which influenced the high popularity of education and research. On the other hand, in this prioritization, the recommendations targeted against industry were not that visible.

Combining three approaches
The three approaches (desktop analysis of identifying and structuring the barriers and recommendations; industrial assessment done in the workshops; and the collection of ERN partners' opinions) were combined to finally select the most important recommendations. In order to combine the three views the recommendations were put into a common table, Table 3. The table contains the recommendations influencing at least three barriers, recommendations selected by the industrial workshop and recommendations selected by at least three experts. It can be seen that 5 recommendations were supported by all the 3 approaches: increasing investment, promoting remanufacturing advantages, benefitting from integrated service offerings, improving cross-disciplinary education, and promoting products suitable for remanufacturing. 8 recommendations were supported by 2 approaches: creating a certification mark, mobilising supply chain communications, raising the policy profile of remanufacturing, boosting international research and education, promoting leasing as an enabler, developing extended producer responsibility, and directly assisting businesses to incorporate remanufacturing.
It should be noted, though, that this list represents a mixture of issues, actions and potential desired outcomes. The challenge is to unpick these into underlying issues which can then be attributed with specific actions andimportantlysponsors who will take up these actions, believing them to be both practical and valuable. That is the subject of the next section.

Targeted recommendations
The previous sections have described the process of discovering and clustering the main issues, concerns, desired outcomes and potential actions. In the definition of targeted stakeholders for each recommendation it was identified that the previously used categorization (recommendations related to business models, processes, design) was not essential from the stakeholder point of view. Thus to achieve a compact and understandable presentation of recommendations the categorization was transformed to the targeted stakeholder types (regulation, academy & research, industry, general public). Most of the recommendations could be clearly targeted to a specific stakeholder group but some (like increasing the awareness about remanufacturing) were related to several stakeholder types.
The analysis has tried to include the views of different practitioners in different sectors. It is important to recognise thatbecause of the availability of representativesnot all such views have necessarily been accommodated; and, even if they have been, there will be notable differences in preference between independent remanufacturers and OEMs and so on. In addition, the eventual end markets for remanufactured goods -be they business, public sector or consumers -also operate with different mind-sets, openness to the possibilities of remanufacture are more or less well-functioning in the economic sense. Recommendations may therefore not apply equally across all products and markets. As a consequence, we have attempted to distil from the candidate 'issues' those which can have a broad applicability, and caveat where the approach may have an impact limited to specific circumstances.
Taking these factors into account, further refinement of the candidate recommendations has been necessary. The recommendations presented below represent this combination of x Develop a certified mark for remanufacturing x Remove the regulatory barriers to remanufacturing x Differentiate the taxes for remanufacturers x Promote the growth with public procurement policy x practicality, impact and potential attribution to specific actors who will own and execute them. In the following sections, Tables 4, 5, 6, and 7, the targeted recommendations are listed briefly. It is out of the scope of this paper to go into details regarding the recommendations, their implementation timeframe and priorities. More details can be found in [1].

Recommendations for policymakers
The recommendations for policy makers (Table 4) aim to identify how policy could support the enhancement of remanufacturing in Europe. In the background there are for example the trade barriers which limit the potential for remanufacturing being able to globally move goods when supply and demand are not in the same country. To progress in this area, identification of the relevant regulation and how it could be modified, is needed. Different means to support remanufacturing, like financial incentives and public procurement can be used. The general shortage of awareness is proposed to be decreased by the clarification of the definitions of waste and remanufacturing.

Recommendations for educators and researchers
Cross-disciplinary education about remanufacturing is needed ( Table 5): not only technical issues, but also design, process management (including reverse logistics) and business models and management. Especially for the design new approaches and design tools are needed. Thus collaborative, cross-disciplinary research is needed. The recommendation could be elicited further to define a scheme for remanufacturing education and a roadmap for multi-disciplinary remanufacturing research activities. Clarify and disseminate international definition on remanufacturing and related standards. Identify and remove the regulatory barriers to remanufacturing. Improving awareness of and confidence in remanufactured goods Awareness of and confidence in remanufactured products amongst public and domestic purchasers is low.
Promote remanufacturing through public procurement policy. Create a certified mark for remanufacturing and clarify liabilities

Recommendations for multi-stakeholders
One of the objectives of ERN project was to establish European network of actors in the remanufacturing field to promote and collaborate in remanufacturing (Table 6).

Actions for business and industry
The business and industry constitute a group of different kinds of companies which can operate in different roles in the remanufacturing network or companies that are not yet active in remanufacturing. The group involves different types of remanufacturers: Original Equipment Remanufacturers (OER), Contracted remanufacturers (CR) and Independent remanufacturers (IR). Additionally companies are needed for remanufacturing specific service; cleaners, disassemblers, testers, logistics providers; transport and storage, core dealers, brokers, collectors and sorters and maintenance partners and spare part providers, disassemblers and scrap collectors. Also recycling companies and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) not yet performing remanufacturing can be the target for industrial recommendations. The companies may operate in different industrial fields and they may be of different sizes. Thus, because of the high diversity, it is impossible to recommend very detailed and specific actions for the industry, but they need to be given at a proportionally high level. The suitability of each recommendation for a specific company depends largely on the business situation, for example, if it is beneficial and potential to move from product offering to service offering, thus allowing easier return of cores. On the other hand the recommendation Table 5 Targeted recommendations for educators and researchers   Issue  Action Future business leaders' skills agenda Future business leaders, product designers and process operators are not well supplied by conventional training courses.
Boost cross-disciplinary teaching and education in remanufacturing.
Current remanufacturing base skills agenda Existing remanufacturers and potential new ones lack capacity or knowledge to grow and adapt their business models and practices.
Develop learning materials and tools to assist current, growing remanufacturers and those wishing to diversify into remanufacturing.
Advancing remanufacturing state of the art Lack of an international research agenda is hampering the spread and advancement of remanufacturing state of the art.
Increase research and international collaboration to promote remanufacturing. Develop an integrated set of design tools and evaluation techniques that can support business model, product and process design.  (Table 7) can be seen as a generic advice. To build more specific guidelines the generic recommendations should be analysed and turned to the situation of the specific company. Performing this in a number of cases would further validate also the generic recommendations.

Conclusions
In order to promote remanufacturing activities in Europe, the European Commission funded the European Remanufacturing Network project. The project performed a market study in which the proportion of manufactured output that achieves an extended life through remanufacturing (remanufacturing intensity) was identified as a mere 2%. Also future scenarios by 2030 were defined. The most ambitious transformation scenario foresees the potential to triple the volume of remanufacturing in Europe until 2030 up to about 100 billion euros. This paper aims to support the transformation scenario by defining recommendations to overcome the remanufacturing barriers. The barriers for remanufacturing processes, business models and design for remanufacturing were identified based on literature and inclusion of industrial opinions. The recommendations to different stakeholders, including policy making, research & education and industry and general public, were correspondingly studied. The described analysis tried to be as inclusive as possible of the views of different practitioners in different sectors. The analysis resulted in about 300 partly overlapping both for barriers and about 120 recommendations. Thus to report them, structuring, aggregation and prioritization were needed. The paper describes the process of discovering and clustering the main issues, concerns, desired outcomes and potential actions. As a result, nine main recommendations were defined for policy makers, four for research & education, one multi-stakeholder recommendation and seven main recommendations for business and industry. As a result of the aggregation, some of the recommendations are still quite generic. Thus, to implement them in the future they should be further analyzed and concretized. For example, the regulations currently impeding remanufacturing should be further studied and the regulatory changes needed should be detailed. For remanufacturing education and research the needed knowledge and curricula as well as a research roadmap should be further defined. The suitability of the recommendations to industry should be analyzed and validated in different sectors, company sizes and business environments and turned into more concrete guidelines for specific types of companies or specific companies.