In a circular economy, it is expected that resource circulation occurs at as high an economic value as possible, retaining functionality of parts/components in waste products. An emerging example is that parts and components are reused for remanufacturing. Another example is to use them as spare parts for repairing existing products. These practices can reduce the use of new resources, production cost and associated energy consumption while simultaneously yielding larger economic profits.
The share of remanufacturing business, in terms of turnover in sectors with existing remanufacturing practices, was estimated to be 1.9% in 2015 in the European Union, while remanufacturing activities generated sales of 30 billion euros and employment of 190,000 people. Remanufacturing has appeared in many sectors, including automobile, aerospace, electrical and electronic equipment, medical equipment, machinery and more. The United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France have been the biggest remanufacturers so far, and Brazil, India and China have growing remanufacturing activities.
The remanufacturing industry is expected to grow. However, there is no centralized or publicly available data source that can provide the data for this indicator. Efforts to facilitate data collection and make the resulting data publicly available are necessary.