There is a current need in today's society to strive towards a more sustainable development. In order to achieve a development that is more sustainable the present linear flow of material needs to be changed. A contribution to this change towards a sustainable development and more circular flows can be achieved by increasing product remanufacturing. By product remanufacturing costs and efforts are saved deriving from material extraction, transports and manufacturing of the products and their components.

Service selling is an emerging business strategy, which in this thesis has a bearing to remanufacturing. The key idea of selling services is to focus on the customer's need rather than on the hardware/ product itself. The hardware that performs the service is owned by the ser vice provider and not by the customer. When the customer no longer wants the service, the physical hardware is taken back, preferably remanufactured and offered to new users on the market. An increase in products being sold through service selling will potentially generate a larger amount of remanufactured products on the market.

Although, remanufacturing can be conducted without being considered during product design, it is economic and technical preferable to have products designed for remanufacturing when they are to be remanufactured. Therefore, this thesis focuses on design for remanufacturing. The aim of this thesis is to explore, from a remanufacturing process step perspective, in what manner products can be designed in order to facilitate remanufacturing. This has been conducted by analysing which steps that are to be included in a generic remanufacturing process. After finding these through literature and empirical studies, properties for the specific remanufacturing steps were explored.

Empirical data were collected mostly from an Electrolux remanufacturing plant in Motala, Sweden. The remanufacturing process was an analysed both from an economic and technical perspective. Moreover, two household appliances, a refrigerator and a washing machine, were analysed from a remanufacturing perspective.

The steps in a generic remanufacturing process were in alphabetical order; Cleaning, Disassembly, Inspection, Reassembly, Repair, Storage and Testing. These steps were all analysed and preferable properties were found to each of them. The relations between remanufacturing process steps and product properties are illustrated in the form of a matrix at the end of the thesis called RemPro. Several properties were found in many steps and the product properties that were found most frequently were;

• easy to access
• easy to handle
• easy to separate and,
• wear resistance.