A Commission policy officer from DG GROW's Machinery, Equipment & AI unit confirmed that the incoming Machinery Regulation, applicable from 20 January 2027, remains focused on safety and free movement rather than circularity, meaning manufacturers currently have to track circular requirements through separate, only loosely aligned frameworks such as the WEEE Directive, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the Critical Raw Materials Act and repairability rules, with two further initiatives in preparation, the Circular Economy Act and the European Product Act, expected to introduce clearer rules on secondary raw materials, digital product passports and requirements for reused, repaired or remanufactured products. Research presented at the workshop reviewed 86 life cycle assessment studies across 39 machinery technologies and found that manufacturing-stage impacts become significantly more important as machines are electrified and used less intensively, a pattern already familiar from electric vehicles, suggesting manufacturers of hybrid and electric tractors, excavators and similar equipment may need to prioritise lifetime extension and shared-use models over pure use-phase efficiency gains.

Three industrial cases gave concrete evidence of what circular strategies already deliver at scale. At Herrenknecht, which manufactures highly customised, multi-thousand-tonne tunnel boring machines, a buy-back and remanufacturing programme called REBUILD now rebuilds around 50,000 components a year at a dedicated facility near Strasbourg, cutting the carbon footprint of remanufactured components by more than 71% compared with newly produced ones, a figure verified through an independent greenhouse gas declaration. At Liebherr Components, remanufacturing hydraulic pumps, gearboxes and engines delivered 75-78% savings in primary material use and up to 53% reductions in embodied emissions, while Bosch's Feuerbach plant generated substantial cost and material savings simply by internally reusing around 1,500 industrial machines rather than replacing them, and ELWEMA Automotive cut around two tonnes of weight, and roughly 17% of emissions, from automotive assembly machinery by reducing steel wall thickness in machine beds and substituting steel with plastics in feeding systems. Across all cases, speakers stressed that scaling these approaches depends less on the technology itself than on solving trust and quality-assurance questions for remanufactured parts, resolving waste-classification rules that can treat returned components as waste and trigger cross-border legal barriers, and building the long-term supplier relationships and data systems that let components be tracked and returned in the first place.

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