Background: Remanufacturing transforms end-of-life products into new products, which brings cost savings for the usage of energy and materials and environmental protection. Sustainability is a significant issue for remanufacturing SMEs trying to stay competitive in the marketplace, while remanufacturing seems to be a promising strategy to explore for increasing the environmental and economic burdens on society. Despite sustainability being a known concept, it very often becomes a purely strategic goal which is not defined at the operational level of business. The major objective of this paper is to determine a set of sustainability indicators for an evaluation of the remanufacturing process, integrating economic, social and environmental aspects of business.

Methods: The literature review method was used to verify current knowledge on remanufacturing sustainability indicators, while the observation method was used to determine the specifics of the remanufacturing process. The brainstorming method aimed to verify the usefulness of existing indicator frameworks and define a set of indicators developed for the assessment of remanufacturing sustainability.

Results: In the presented paper, a set of 11 remanufacturing sustainability indicators was prepared, which were tested on a company in Poland that was remanufacturing a diesel particulate filter.

Conclusions: Although the proposed set of remanufacturing sustainability indicators was defined for a specific company, it may be used as a guideline for comprehensive indicator framework development, regardless of the product type or the size of the company. The main challenge in introducing sustainability at the operational level of remanufacturing in business is enabling multilevel assessments while considering particular sustainability aspects and the company as a whole. This outlines directions for future research.