Adopting additional product-life extension strategies - A study of reuse and remanufacturing in the maritime industry

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential barriers of adopting additional product-life extension strategies and therefore increase the understanding of this phenomenon. Just as the name implies, product-life extension entails keeping resources in use for as long as possible in order to extract maximum value from them. Specifically, the strategies investigated in this research are reuse and remanufacturing, regarded by the circular economy community as more value-capturing activities than other more widespread and for long preferred strategies such as recycling. Inquiry is made into the under-researched empirical context of the maritime industry, as existing studies are focusing more on other capital-intensive industries. This research employs a qualitative approach to ascertain the opinions of maritime industry experts identified in managing directors and technical managers across five industrial stakeholder groups by means of interviews and questionnaires. The paper at hand makes enquiries into substantive and formal theories, as theoretical inferences are drawn from well-received product-life extension literature, established strategic renewal and inertia literature, as well as stakeholder theory, culminating into a framework outlining potential barriers that serves as the guiding element for the empirical data collection. The main findings of this research point towards three main barriers that prohibits the industry from adopting additional product-life extension strategies; (1) reliance on the utilization and continuous optimization of current strategies i.e. recycling (2) absence of policy and regulation that promotes reuse and remanufacturing, and (3) stakeholder misalignment in articulating the potential that adopting additional PLE strategies hold. The study furthers understanding of the industrial stakeholder influence to be dispersed however paramount in leveraging existing resources and competencies to overcome the barriers in adopting additional product-life extension strategies such as reuse and remanufacturing.