Repair and Reuse: Eco-Design as a Driver of Industrial Competitiveness

Geoeconomic tensions over certain resources and the current instability of supply chains are leading companies to adjust their industrial strategies. In this context, integrating eco-design today means preparing for future competitiveness.

While more than 90% of companies already engaged in eco-design and able to assess its effects report a neutral or positive impact on their revenue [1], the 2025 eco-design barometer published by the Pôle Eco-conception for ADEME highlights that “companies […] with a confirmed to expert level of maturity […] are more likely to have experienced positive outcomes.”

France’s regulatory lead on repair, reuse, and extending product lifespans represents an opportunity. By anticipating the second life of their products, companies go beyond mere regulatory compliance: they strengthen their ability to build a sustainable circular business model. Designing and developing products that are easy to repair and reuse is becoming a new industrial strategy, where repair and refurbishment activities generate additional value while meeting sovereignty requirements and the growing demand for more responsible consumption.

Eco-design: the upstream technical challenge

The viability of a circular model relies on a complex equation that must be addressed from the product design stage: reconciling regulatory compliance, customer expectations, and the product’s ability to generate value across the different loops of the circular economy. The initial technical dimension is therefore a prerequisite to ensure the feasibility and efficiency of subsequent repair, refurbishment, or reuse processes.

Field feedback highlights the importance of structured eco-design to make key components easily accessible. The use of irreversible fastenings, such as adhesives, overmolding, or resin encapsulation of electronic boards, can hinder disassembly. Conversely, standardizing fasteners enables design teams to create the conditions for quicker and more cost-effective product servicing. Working on the modularity of sub-assemblies, or even their interchangeability across products, also simplifies repairs and optimizes spare parts inventory management. Examples of modular batteries adaptable to multiple products already exist on the market.

This durability engineering requires a solid understanding of the technical barriers encountered in practice. By collaborating with industry experts or their reference eco-organizations, designers can develop a prioritized strategy to evolve product design, integrating repair and reuse as future stages in the product lifecycle.

Without this initial technical mastery, the promise of a second life remains purely theoretical. Designing products for an extended lifecycle is essential to ensure both the economic viability of repair and reuse operations and the product’s environmental performance.

Organizational transformation toward new business models

Beyond the technical dimension, the transition to a circular economy relies on a genuine organizational transformation that goes far beyond eco-design and involves all parts of the company.

As evidenced by several producers affiliated with ecosystem, many functions must be mobilized. Marketing teams play a key role in balancing customer expectations with eco-design requirements. Procurement departments help identify and certify suppliers capable of delivering components that meet new disassembly and modularity standards. This internal synergy can also draw on after-sales service, whose data are crucial for identifying failures, repair times, and costs.

This collective maturity in circular economy practices becomes a springboard for new business models. The challenge is not so much to reinvent repair and refurbishment processes alone, but to build strategic partnerships with the right stakeholders. For repair, this means connecting with local repair networks. For example, the QualiRépar-certified network—dedicated to electrical and electronic equipment—counted 9,896 repair points in 2025 [2]. For reuse, partnerships with Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) actors provide immediate operational expertise in sorting and refurbishing equipment. They also help relocalize part of the value chain and amplify the social value associated with product reuse. To get started, companies can rely on various support mechanisms, such as calls for projects led by the eco-organization ecosystem, which allocated around €700,000 in 2024 to 11 innovative projects.

By co-developing solutions with specialized partners, companies complement their product sales with high-performing and sustainable services, gradually moving toward a strongly circular model.

Leveraging circular models: a major differentiation driver

To turn circular economy commitments into a commercial advantage, the efforts made by manufacturers must be made visible to end customers.

Improvements enabled by upstream eco-design provide tangible evidence of a product’s optimization for extended use. Regulatory indicators implemented in France are factual tools to demonstrate this performance: a well-designed electrical product achieves better repairability or durability scores—metrics now closely examined by consumers—and allows manufacturers to access eco-contribution bonuses of €10 or even €20 per unit, paid by eco-organizations.

Finally, this commitment to extending product lifespans can also be demonstrated through environmental performance assessments. Refurbished products often have a lower environmental footprint than their new equivalents. Robust calculation methodologies, developed in consortiums and tailored to each sector, are available for these analyses. By demonstrating a lower carbon footprint than competitors, companies make decarbonization a strategic differentiator—a real competitiveness factor today in sectors such as construction or in public procurement tenders.

Eco-design is therefore not a technical constraint, but the foundational pivot for a new form of value creation. By investing in eco-design, producers create the conditions necessary for the viability of new service-based activities structured around repair and reuse.

Baptiste Perrissin Fabert, Deputy CEO of ADEME, offers an insightful perspective: “The transition to a circular economy progresses in concentric circles, with a vanguard of impact-driven entrepreneurs, leading mainstream corporations capable of pulling their sectors forward, and a ‘sweeper car’ regulation for the majority who only move in response to regulation. The issue is not ideological—it is strategic.”

Mastering the product lifecycle paves the way for industrial sovereignty. By systematizing circularity and leveraging local ecosystems, are producers not, ultimately, securing their value chains and business models against the instability of global markets?

Sources:

[1] CUSSOL Marie, Pôle Eco-conception, 2025. Corporate impact reduction approaches: state of play. 66 pages. Available online.

[2] CLCV, 2026. Report from the observatory of the repair fund for electrical and electronic equipment (EEE). 25 pages. Available online.

This article is a translated version. The original publication is available on Les Echos Solutions :
https://solutions.lesechos.fr/business/actu-entreprise/reparation-et-reemploi-l-eco-conception-au-service-de-la-competitivite-industrielle/