Guided by a shared vision to change the world through circularity, Basel and San Antonio meet in this talk. At Basel’s Franck Areal, Gabriel Eckenstein explains how three siblings bought an idle industrial site. Together with the canton, they co-created BaselCircular to make circularity tangible across design, production, and full lifecycles. From Texas, Christopher Moken shows how Circular San Antonio is building a Material Innovation Center to store and upcycle deconstruction materials. Financing is the key bottleneck. This talk connects a family-led public-private partnership in Basel with a nonprofit platform in San Antonio. The goal is to accelerate real circular-economy projects.
They show
- A family buys an idle industrial site and opens a circular lighthouse to the public
- BaselCircular: a PPP that moves circularity beyond recycling into design and production
- A neutral nonprofit aligns city, business, universities and foundations — then backs it with shared infrastructure (Material Innovation Center) to make reuse work at scale
- The “Material Innovation Center” plan to solve the storage gap in building reuse
- A funding playbook: ask foundations/families to allocate 1–5% to circular assets
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