From Optimization to Robustness: Why Reuse Is Becoming Europe's Strategic Infrastructure

On 19 May 2026, Ardabelle Founding Partner Eric Hazan joined a panel at the Reuse Economy Expo in Paris: La Reuse Economy: pilier de la souveraineté et de la réindustrialisation de l'Europe. Moderated by Célia Rennesson, the conversation gathered Agnès Pannier-Runacher, Vincent Charlet (La Fabrique de l'Industrie), Carine de Boissezon (EDF), Esther Finidori (Schneider Electric), and Eric Hazan for Ardabelle Capital.

What struck us most was how strongly Ardabelle's core thesis is resonating well beyond the investment world — across industry, energy, public policy and European sovereignty.

A confirmation of the Greening the Arteries thesis

Many ideas from Greening the Arteries of Europe's Economy surfaced throughout the discussion:

Resilience becoming a competitive advantage.
The structural cost of inaction.
The limits of hyper-optimization.
Circularity as industrial infrastructure.
Robustness as a strong economic logic. > Reuse, maintenance and resilient value chains are no longer "sustainability topics". They are becoming strategic industrial and geopolitical topics.

A shift in language

The vocabulary itself is moving: from optimization to robustness, from short-term efficiency to long-term resilience, from extraction to preservation of value. More than rhetoric, it reflects a recalibration of what "good" looks like for European industry.

Reuse as industrial infrastructure

The most powerful idea of the panel: reuse is infrastructure. Like grids or logistics platforms, it is a foundational layer that makes industrial activity possible — built out of materials and equipment we already own. In a Europe constrained on critical resources, energy and trade access, that reframes circularity as a sovereignty lever, and maintenance, refurbishment and remanufacturing as strategic capabilities.

This is precisely where Ardabelle invests: companies at the core of Europe's industrial fabric, at the intersection of decarbonization, resource efficiency and value chain resilience.