Walter Stahel holds a book up to the camera. On the back is a black-and-white photo of himself and Geneviève Reday-Mulvey as young researchers. The book was published in the United States in 1981, is called "Jobs for Tomorrow" and is based on a report the two wrote in 1976 at the Battelle Institute in Geneva for the European Commission. The film "50 Years of Circular Economy" presents it as the world's first scientific report on the circular economy. For the film, Erica Mazerolle, Felix Stähli and Christian Häuselmann visit the two at Walter Stahel's home on the outskirts of Geneva. The term circular economy did not yet exist at the time: the two spoke of an "économie en boucle", a looped economy. 50 years later, in the middle of the AI revolution, "Jobs for Tomorrow" is more relevant than ever.
Manpower instead of energy
The idea for the visionary report came from practice: Stahel is an architect, graduated from ETH Zurich in 1971, and had previously spent several years in England, mostly renovating buildings. There he learned that renovating a building instead of demolishing it takes far more labour, from architects and craftspeople alike, and produces practically no waste. When he joined Battelle in 1973, Europe was in the first oil price crisis and unemployment was high. His conclusion: replace energy and machines with manpower and tackle both problems at once, at the root.
The economists at Battelle and at the Commission in Brussels did not share this view. To them, progress meant replacing people with machines, not the other way round. For almost a year the architect went door to door in Brussels, often late into the evening, until the Commission granted a small budget. His boss at Battelle signed the contract only on two conditions: an economist had to join the team for the macroeconomic part. And if Brussels did not accept the report, he would be fired.
The economist was Geneviève Reday-Mulvey. She had studied economics and sociology in Grenoble, earned a master's in development economics at UCLA and worked in Senegal and at the WHO. At Battelle she had no project at the time, so she said yes.
Three months, three industries
The two researched under intense pressure for three months. They examined three industries in France: construction, the car industry and building materials. France, because good French statistical data was available and Paris was easy to reach from Geneva. They collected the figures from ministries and from the statistics office INSEE, since they were not yet available on a computer.
The car showed the idea most clearly. It was already known then, although it is not in the report, that a Volvo had a life expectancy of 20 to 22 years and a Renault only of 10 to 12.
A car that takes, for example, 30 percent more energy to build but lasts twice as long saves a lot of energy per year. It needs more repairs and reconditioning, and that is where the potential for jobs lay: around 300,000 people worked in the French car industry, and already around one million in garages. The economist gives these figures from memory and notes that they need checking.
That did not yet convince the economists. Battelle's chief economist accused the two of dodging the problem by talking about services: to him, the economy was production. In Brussels the report was found very interesting, but people suspected a mistake somewhere. Nobody found one. After several meetings, a chief economist decided to apply Karl Popper's principle of falsification: what cannot be refuted has to be accepted as true.
That was the turning point. From then on, people listened.
From report to book
The economist left Battelle in 1977, the architect in 1979. He insisted on publishing the results so that they would not be lost. In Europe that would have required a publisher. In the United States it took only a few months: the book came out at Vantage Press in 1981, at the authors' expense.
Walter Stahel also explains why it can be found on Google Books today: books published in the US end up in the Library of Congress, which Google later scanned. The subtitle carries the name of the report: "The Potential for Substituting Manpower for Energy". According to the two, the book found more resonance in Japan and China than in Western Europe and the US.
The full dialogue, a journey back in time, runs one hour and 47 minutes and is in French. In it, the two also describe what their intellectual centre of innovation was back then: the Battelle cafeteria, where researchers from every discipline exchanged ideas, where open encounters with industry and politics were possible, and where they could debate how repair and reuse can become attractive in affluent societies too.
What is missing today
For Geneviève Reday-Mulvey, the ideas were already there in the 1970s, with the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth", "Small is Beautiful" and the books of Ivan Illich. With the financialisation of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s these approaches were pushed aside, and only rediscovered with the circular economy. Had they been put into practice back then, we would not have today's big problems with climate change, she says: "We lost a generation."
Walter Stahel went on to develop the circular economy in the 1980s and 1990s. One problem, as he sees it, is that it is invisible: new cars get big advertising in football stadiums, the circular economy does not. Repair also needs proximity. If the fridge breaks and the electrician comes from Meyrin near Geneva, the journey costs more than the repair, so people buy new. That is why he opposes plans in the canton of Geneva to turn industrial and commercial zones into residential neighbourhoods. Without repair workshops in every municipality, the circular economy does not work, in his view.
A study he did for Deutsche Bahn shows how big the lever can be. By his calculations, remanufacturing a high-speed train costs 87 percent less than buying a new one for the same result and saves around 90 percent of the material and energy of new production. Yet what convinced the managers was not the price but the proof that the train could be technically upgraded and fitted with additional seats in the process.
For Walter Stahel, recycling comes only at the very end. Reuse, repair and remanufacturing come first. That he hardly needs to say so himself on LinkedIn anymore, because others do it for him, shows him that the ideas are spreading.
When he speaks to students, he gives them a slogan: "Enjoy the use of what you have and take care." Everything that is sold, manufactured and advertised as new, they should forget, or at least question critically.
In short: from the first idea to the broad breakthrough often takes a whole generation, 20 to 30 years. And it takes a mix of strong will, courage, humour, passion and confidence.