European remanufacturing industry is crucial for the sustainable transition of Europe and the advancement of the circular economy, thanks to the savings in energy, materials and functionality that is guaranteed by the process. In fact, the socio- economic benefits of remanufacturing, in terms of number of workers, skills development and technological uptake, are as impactful as the environmental benefits. However, to future-proof the European remanufacturing industry and increase its competitiveness, the obstacles facing the human worker need to be addressed as a matter of strategic urgency. Currently, established remanufacturing sectors recognised the barriers in the limited automation, poor human inclusion, lack of traceability and restricted use of digitalisation.

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rEUman aims at developing and demonstrating a novel paradigm of human-centric remanufacturing approach for the European industry, acting at factory and value-chain levels. At the factory level, the main industrial need is to guarantee high regeneration rates of the remanufactured products and to achieve traceability of the remanufacturing process-chain. While at the value-chain level, the main industrial need is to guarantee stability in terms of volume and quality of the post-use products. rEUman shall demonstrate the new remanufacturing paradigm, which is intrinsically human-safe, target-driven in regeneration and certification, flexible while facing variability in post-use parts, robust and replicable to new circular business cases.

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To that end, the ambition of the rEUman project is:

• To develop cutting edge remanufacturing approaches (factory level) and integrating them into the value-chain

• To demonstrate functional retention in three sectors (automotive, home appliances and optoelectronics)

• To introduce traceability in remanufacturing by implementing the first remanufacturing-centred digital product passport (DPP)

• To consider operational and economic viability by showcasing complete business cases supported by custom designed training material.

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The objectives and the ambition of rEUman are fully compliant with the general requirements of the call “Climate neutral, circular and digitised production HORIZON-CL4-2023-TWIN-TRANSITION-01, and with the specific requirements of the topic “HORIZON-CL4-2023-TWIN-TRANSITION-01-04 — Factory-level and value chain approaches for remanufacturing (Made in Europe Partnership)”.