Standardizing products, processes, and data to enable large-scale industrialization

Reuse—whether through refurbishment, second-hand markets, repair, or reuse—has entered a phase of acceleration. This momentum is driven both by a growing number of pilot projects and by practices already widely embedded in everyday life, as illustrated by second-hand platforms that have become mainstream. This surge represents a structuring phase: it allows for testing concrete solutions and highlighting operational constraints. However, it faces a key challenge: each initiative develops its own rules, formats, and tools. In the absence of technical convergence, each player designs its own solutions, making large-scale deployment uncertain. Standardization therefore emerges as a key lever to align practices, ensure system compatibility, and organize coordination between stakeholders.

Why standardization is essential

Standardization means harmonizing practices and enabling stakeholders to work on shared foundations. This homogenization reduces fragmentation among existing systems and makes them compatible, ensuring interoperability and interchangeability.

This compatibility brings several benefits. Standardization reduces costs, as the diversity of formats currently leads to high expenses related to developing multiple APIs, complex sorting processes, multiple storage systems, and the need to store specific tools and parts required for repairing each product. It also strengthens trust and ease of use, encouraging user adoption.

Industrial history shows that building standards takes time. For example, it took around fifteen years to generalize the USB-C port in consumer electronics. For reuse, however, this alignment must accelerate in response to environmental and regulatory urgency.

The pillars to standardize: data, processes, and products

Three dimensions must come together to make reuse systems coherent and scalable: data, processes, and products.

Traceability standards form one of the foundations of reuse. A product intended for reuse must be tracked throughout its life cycle. It is therefore necessary to know its condition, components, usage history, number of cycles completed, and maintenance operations. Standardization ensures that this information is understandable and usable by all stakeholders.

The future Digital Product Passport (DPP), a European requirement, follows this logic by imposing structured tracking. For reusable household packaging, traceability makes it possible to monitor flows, track inventory in real time, and optimize logistics operations. Initiatives such as Impack’t, led by GS1 France, demonstrate growing awareness among stakeholders and the need to establish common traceability standards.

Processes define the essential steps required for certain products and strengthen trust between stakeholders. In refurbishment, ensuring quality relies on precise criteria shared by all. This involves adopting common diagnostic protocols across all models, defining uniform verification criteria, and complying with standardized safety requirements.

Logistics flows—from collection to sorting, repair, and resale—also follow standardized steps. The RECQ label, the first European label for refurbished second-hand products, issued by RCube and verified by DEKRA Certification, is creating new momentum by certifying the quality of these operations and ensuring compliance at scale.

Finally, product design directly influences their ability to integrate into reuse systems. In professional logistics, reusable crates must meet durability and equipment compatibility requirements while remaining easy for operators to handle. They must be modular, capable of stacking and combining into units compatible with pallet formats, and include similar folding and unfolding mechanisms to enable automation.

A collective dynamic for operational reuse

Standardization emerges from a collective and gradual process. No single stakeholder can define the conditions for reuse alone: needs and constraints vary depending on products, supply chains, and sectors.

The creation of working groups helps bring stakeholders together, compare practices, and co-develop shared solutions. These spaces for dialogue ensure that standards are both realistic and applicable at scale.

Pilot experiments are another key lever. They make it possible to test formats, processes, and data exchange in real-world conditions. By analyzing what works and what needs improvement, stakeholders progressively establish concrete and reliable references that form the foundation of standards.

Standardization is also built step by step. It begins with defining essential requirements, then evolves as practices stabilize and new innovations emerge. This approach avoids excessive rigidity and ensures that standards remain aligned with technological developments. Clearly documenting criteria and best practices creates a shared knowledge base accessible to all.

Coordinating initiatives to structure reuse

The State defines objectives, providing direction for stakeholders. However, its role could go further by orchestrating all initiatives to better coordinate stakeholders and facilitate the emergence of common technical solutions.

Since this orchestration is not fully ensured, companies—supported by federations, associations, standardization bodies, and eco-organizations—must define a neutral and coordinated framework.

The Reuse Economy Expo, already operational, represents a strong dynamic where stakeholders from various sectors can explore multi-sector levers to make reuse operational at scale. This contributes to transforming the current wave of initiatives into a coherent system capable of supporting the large-scale deployment of reuse.

This article is a translated version. The original publication is available on Les Echos Solutions :
https://solutions.lesechos.fr/business/actu-entreprise/standardiser-les-produits-les-process-et-les-donnees-pour-permettre-l-industrialisation-a-grande-echelle/