PEARL joins 13-industry effort to educate U.S. Congress and change government policies towards the purchase of reconditioned and remanufactured equipment.

AURORA, CO - Today, many governments around the world do not purchase remanufactured or reconditioned equipment. PEARL, working with representatives from 13 other industries, hopes to change that.

Bill Schofield, PEARL past president and President of Circuit Breaker Sales Co., Inc. (CBS, Gainesville, TX), recently attended the Remanufacturing Industries Council (RIC) Executive Leadership Team Meeting in Chicago, October 26 and 27, as a CBS and PEARL representative.

"The focus of the event was to bring together many different remanufacturing industry segments so that we could pool our resources to communicate to Congress the many benefits of remanufacturing," explains Schofield. "In addition to the skilled American jobs that remanufacturing and reconditioning creates, the environmental benefits of resource conservation and landfill management are too significant to ignore. And if you do the total cost-of-ownership calculations on top of these things, there is nothing but positive benefits for society from the promotion and consumption of re-certified goods. But presently, many governments preclude the purchase of any reconditioned or remanufactured goods. And that is what we aim to change." Schofield was recently appointed Chairman of the RIC Trade Policies & Legal Issues Committee and helped to author the RIC's definition of "remanufacturing."

During the meeting, RIC members discussed a new study being conducted by the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), an independent, nonpartisan, quasi-judicial federal agency with broad investigative powers on matters of trade and tariff issues. USITC is conducting the remanufacturing industry study at the request of the U.S. Congress as part of an ongoing effort to promote U.S. exports.

While the study will mainly focus on issues related to remanufacturing companies that export goods, Schofield says part of the study will also impact domestic equipment sales by quantifying and analyzing the size of U.S. remanufacturing industries by employment, revenue, and other relevant factors, including the electrical remanufacturing industry. This information could be very useful to PEARL as it promotes its reconditioning standards to the electrical industry, Schofield adds.

Co-founded by the Rochester Institute of Technology's National Center for Remanufacturing and Resource Recovery and the Council on Competitiveness, a national nonprofit organization focused on economic development, RIC supports multiple efforts to quantify, educate, and promote the U.S. remanufacturing industries. RIC includes representatives from some of the U.S.' largest manufacturing companies, including Caterpillar Inc., General Electric Co., and General Motors, among others.

Bill Schofield, PEARL past president, and Congressman Walter Jones of NC
at Remanufacturing Industries Council (RIC) Executive Leadership Team Meeting