Glossary
The words the repair industry uses.
Refurbishment sits at the intersection of industrial operations, data protection and European environmental law - three fields with their own vocabulary. These are the 24 terms that come up most often, defined plainly.
All terms
- ITADIT Asset Disposition
- The controlled process of retiring IT equipment so that data is destroyed, value is recovered and disposal is documented.
- WEEEWaste Electrical and Electronic Equipment
- The EU directive that makes producers responsible for collecting and treating electrical and electronic equipment at end of life.
- ESPR & Digital Product PassportEcodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation
- The EU framework that sets ecodesign requirements per product group and attaches a machine-readable Digital Product Passport to each item.
- EPRExtended Producer Responsibility
- The principle that makes producers financially and operationally responsible for their products once consumers are done with them.
- AGEC lawLoi anti-gaspillage pour une économie circulaire
- The French circular-economy law that introduced the repairability index, the durability index and a wave of new producer-responsibility obligations.
- Right to RepairDirective (EU) 2024/1799
- The EU directive obliging manufacturers to repair certain products at a reasonable price and within a reasonable time, including after the legal guarantee has expired.
- Device grading
- The standardised assessment that assigns a used device a cosmetic and functional condition, driving its price and its route through the workshop.
- Repair yield
- The share of devices entering a workshop that leave it working and saleable, instead of being scrapped or harvested for parts.
- Erasure certificate
- The auditable record proving that all data on a specific device was destroyed, by a named method, at a known date.
- Chain of custody
- The unbroken, documented record of who held a device, when, and what was done to it, from collection to final disposition.
- Reverse logistics
- The flow that moves goods backwards | from the user toward collection, inspection, repair, resale or recycling.
- Refurbished vs. remanufactured
- Refurbishing restores a specific device to working, saleable condition; remanufacturing rebuilds units to an as-new specification, usually with interchangeable parts.
- R2v3Responsible Recycling, version 3
- The SERI certification standard for electronics reuse and recycling facilities, covering data security, environment, health and safety.
- SOPStandard Operating Procedure
- A written, versioned instruction that defines how one operation is performed, so any trained technician produces the same result.
- Data sanitisation
- Rendering the data on a storage device unrecoverable, by one of three methods with different levels of assurance.
- WEEELABEXWEEE Label of Excellence
- The European standard and certification scheme for the collection, sorting, storage, transport, preparation for reuse and treatment of electrical and electronic waste.
- e-Stewards
- A certification for electronics recyclers and ITAD operators built around strict environmental, export and labour requirements.
- Eco-modulation
- Adjusting the fee a producer pays into an EPR scheme according to how repairable, durable or recyclable the product is.
- Repairability index
- A score displayed at the point of sale rating how easily a product can be repaired, introduced in France and now being folded into a broader durability score.
- Triage
- The intake decision that routes each incoming device toward repair, parts harvesting, direct resale or recycling.
- Parts harvesting
- Recovering working components from devices that cannot be economically repaired, to supply the repair of others.
- First-time fix rate
- The share of repairs that pass final quality control on the first attempt, without rework or a second pass.
- Trade-inalso: buyback
- The mechanism by which a user hands back a used device, usually against a credit, feeding it into a refurbishment flow.
- Device-as-a-ServiceDaaS
- Providing devices to an organisation as a subscription, not a purchase, with the provider retaining ownership and taking them back at end of term.
Turning these words into an operation.
REAV designs, equips and runs the workshops where this vocabulary becomes daily practice.