A tool for assessing customers' barriers for consuming remanufactured products

Paper in proceeding, 2017

One opportunity to address our world's environmental challenges is to change our patterns of consumption towards more sustainable ones, e.g. buying used products, renting products, and joining pools for co-consumption. All of these patterns share at least one point of departure: They imply that people use products that other people have used before. In this context, remanufacturing is a particular opportunity. In principle, remanufacturing means that a used product is industrially renovated in order to assure quality. However, remanufacturing is still just a niche, and the established pattern of consumption and production-involving new products-is very dominant. Reflecting this, there is a need to better understand how to gain acceptance for remanufactured products, and in particular to understand customers' barriers and drivers for consuming used and remanufactured products. Reflecting this background, the tool presented in this paper is aiming to support remanufacturing organisations to get a better understanding about the customers and their possible ways of reasoning when they approach an offer based on a remanufactured product.