The story so far

Time flies – and APRA Europe has spent 30 years (1989-2019) in the service of the European remanufacturing industry. It’s a good moment for a retrospective…

APRA Europe celebrates its 30th anniversary during - and together with - ReMaTec 2019 in Amsterdam. Both institutions are closely related to each other, as most of you know. Due to its large network and expertise in the remanufacturing industry, APRA Europe was one of the founding members of ReMaTec and is happy to co-host a joint anniversary event at the show. You may have noticed that ReMaTec 2019 is the 10th edition of the most renowned European remanufacturing event. At the time when ReMaTec opened its doors for the very first time in 2001, APRA had already been active for 12 years inside Europe.

But let us recap what has been achieved so far.

Founding fathers
The European branch of APRA was founded in 1989 by APRA USA together with eager European remanufacturing veteran Fernand Weiland. The goal was to advance and promote a branch of business that had not been well-known - or even accepted as a professional type of business - in those far-off days. While Fernand has been the chairman of the association for most of the time, a few successors followed in his footsteps: Peter Bartel – currently in the position of vice chairman - as well as Dr. Carsten Buecker and Peter Larsen were three of them.

Today, Dr. Daniel C. F. Koehler chairs the association and paved the way to the next level of the European association activities, now in the form of an officially acknowledged Belgian non-profit association (called APRA Europe AISBL) This has been in place since December 2018 and we have reported several times in ReMaTecNews about progress. He will set the basis for future association growth - thus gaining more weight among European law-giving institutions and the public.

In the 30 years following the foundation of APRA Europe, significant successes have been achieved by the organisation’s dedication and ongoing commitment to the benefit of remanufacturing.

Significant achievements
The most prominent among these would perhaps be the contribution to the Basel Convention where APRA Europe helped achieve the result that cores intended to be remanufactured are now defined as non-waste. This was a big success for the automotive industry.

Further regulatory frameworks that have successfully been influenced by APRA Europe are the G7 Declaration of Elmau, which mentioned remanufacturing as an integral part of the agenda and came up with circular economy activities. APRA Europe has also just recently blocked antiremanufacturing regulation attempts in the field of caliper regulation.

“Together with our growing remanufacturing community, we will go for another - and still more successful - 30 years,” Dr. Koehler forecasts. He invites everybody to visit APRA Europe at its booth P.03 in the Foyer area at ReMaTec 2019 in Amsterdam. There it will be possible to discuss key issues and challenges – as well as the expectations of the industry in general and what remanufacturers can expect from an association like APRA Europe for even better services.