Progressing from the Material to the Immaterial Cycles of the Circular Industrial Economy

Prof. Dr Walter R. Stahel is a Swiss architect, graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich in 1971. He has been influential in developing the field of sustainability, by advocating 'service-life extension of goods - reuse, repair, remanufacture, upgrade technologically' philosophies as they apply to industrialised economies. He has been founder-director of the Product-Life Institute (Switzerland), the oldest established consultancy in Europe devoted to developing sustainable strategies and policies, since 1983. His ideas and those of similar theorists led to what is now known as the circular economy in which industry adopts the reuse and service-life extension of goods as a strategy of waste prevention, regional job creation and resource efficiency in order to decouple wealth from resource consumption, that is to dematerialise the industrial economy. Since the mid-1970s, Stahel has been an accomplished circular economy pioneer and an active proponent of circular thinking since the publication of his 1976 report on the Potential for Substituting Manpower for Energy to the European Commission. His point of view is that a circular economy is about economics, and that waste managers have to become wealth preservation managers, moving up the value preservation chain. Stahel organised the International Design Forum 1992 on the topic of “common utilisation instead of singular consumption”. He has written numerous papers, spoken at conferences, lectured on design for sustainability, and worked as consultant to industry and policymakers on developing and designing sustainable solutions. He founded the Geneva-based Product-Life Institute in 1983. Currently, Walter Stahel works as an author, keynote speaker and storyteller. He promotes understanding of the structure of an economy in loops and its drivers and obstacles (circular industrial economy), spreads knowledge about the competitiveness of a performance economy selling goods and molecules as a service, and identifies the levers to speed up the shift from a linear industrial economy managing flows to a circular economy managing stocks. He does this through workshops, lectures and policy groups.