Remanufacturing in the UK: A snapshot of the UK remanufacturing industry

Introduction

‘The 2004 survey Remanufacturing in the UK: a significant contributor to sustainable development? marked the first UK assessment of the activity known as remanufacturing. The practice of remanufacturing, described and defined more fully in Section 2, was at the time poorly recognised and formed no part of waste and resource strategy, and certainly did not attract the support which was being aggressively placed into recycling initiatives.

Any perceptions of the domain of ‘remanufacturing’ were largely labelled with uncomplimentary phrases such as ‘second-hand’ and ‘refurbished’ and associated with charitable and low skill ventures in furniture, fridges or washing machines.

As described in Section 3, and echoing a similar study conducted in the USA, what really existed was an opportunistic, business-driven class of engineering activity. It was largely hidden but addressed – in the main – the life extension and upgrade of goods transacted between businesses. It was not motivated by environmental concerns, but the net effect of the closed-loop business systems required for retrieval of products was, without exception, beneficial in both materials and energy saving.

These attributes, although financially welcomed, were not considered to be a source of commercial differentiation or advantage, nor exploited as symbols of ‘greener’ business practices.

In many sectors there was dominance of a few large companies, but with a long tail of smaller companies often clustered around customers or other centres of activity. The definition taken for remanufacturing implied a high degree of quality control and associated warranty, which favoured the larger operators. In general therefore, we found a range of qualities of remanufacturing that embraced different levels of expectation by the customer concerned.

This scoping study and various pieces of work that followed – some for private customers, others for public sector – proved to be a sufficient evidence base to attract Defra support under its Business Resource Efficiency and Waste (BREW) programme. From 2006 to 2010, Oakdene Hollins has been contracted to promote remanufacturing and reuse by businesses in the UK.

A succession of one year business plans has begun to address the barriers that were identified such as definitions, remanufacturing standards, remediation technologies, purchaser awareness, carbon footprints, supply chain issues, product design, business model development and business leader skills.

The website www.remanufacturing.org.uk provides an enduring record of activities, resources for practitioners and purchasers, and tools for opportunity evaluation.

Activity was badged under a distinct unit within Oakdene Hollins branded as the Centre for Remanufacturing & Reuse (CRR). The title recognised what had been apparent even from the early days: that remanufacturing itself was at the highly engineering-oriented end of a spectrum of reuse.

In certain circumstances remanufacturing offered superlative financial, environmental and feature benefits to customers, but other options might be more appropriate for different categories of goods.

It was important that the scope of the CRR recognised the complexity of product use and could offer a range of so-called end-of-life alternatives including remanufacturing, refurbishing, repair, re-purposing, direct reuse (or remarketing), coupled with the conventional options of recycling, energy from waste and landfill. Over that period, partly due to the efforts of CRR and others such as Green Alliance, the acceptance of the role of reuse as part of a sustainable production and consumption strategy has risen significantly.

Reuse was recognised in Defra’s 2007/08 Waste Strategy, and receives substantial treatment within the EU’s revised Waste Framework Directive, which recognises the resource impacts possible from reuse and the need to differentiate it from waste treatment.

The WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) AGM of November 2009 may mark a pivotal moment in attitudes to reuse.

Under a revised Defra resource efficiency support programme, WRAP will take responsibility for coordinating the delivery of most of the component services previously under BREW. This will entail a migration away from its heartland of waste treatment and materials recycling into more complicated activities.

A recent SEI report commissioned by WRAP has been instrumental in summarising the relative impacts of its traditional activities based on material recovery to the improved efficiencies available from product reuse-based systems. In a relatively short time, therefore, we anticipate a major shift towards addressing the challenges of reuse, including remanufacturing.’