A field study about the status quo of engineering materials, components, products, and their corresponding processes used in the European automotive remanufacturing industry was carried out and will be discussed. Comprehensive data from three Tier-1 suppliers or OEMs including nine remanufacturing products have been collected and analyzed with an explorative research design, aiming at an empirical understanding of what is defining the remanufacturability of products and components. Special focuses will be on materials, joints, geometry, load cases, surfaces, deficits, defects and contaminations of the remanufacturable components among others.

A proper design for remanufacturing (= DfReman) can enable or significantly improve the remanufacturing of products via their remanufacturability, hence potentially helping to scale value-retention processes and decoupling from primary material usage in general. Current approaches towards DfReman are either deductively derived or based on empirical knowledge of remanufacturing practitioners and experts and are usually neither practically verified nor tested. This work is trying to start closing this empirical gap with an inductive approach, i.e. to build theory from empiricism. Empirical findings on the influencing parameters of remanufacturability from our field study “Automotive Remanufacturing in Europe” from 2022 will be compared with existing DfReman strategies and will be used to potentially identify new ones.