Manfred Mühlberger

In 1994, Manfred Mühlberger and his partner founded the ETA Environmental Management GmbH with a focus on corporate environmental protection, environmental orientation and management systems. In 1995, ETA was the first environmental verifier organisation to be accredited in Austria. Since then, resource conservation, waste and emission avoidance have taken centre stage, then under the heading of cleaner production, today as the core of a circular economy.

The Greek letter ETA stands for efficiency and we need to drastically improve this in the way we use our resources, at company level, but above all with a view to the value chains as a whole as system efficiency. This requires major changes in the way companies view and approach things, from product design to the business model. Even with a high level of innovation, this is very difficult to realise in the current market logic.

This is why Manfred, as Chairman of the Executive Board of Ecopreneur.euthe umbrella organisation of sustainable business organisations in the EU, is campaigning for the rules of the game to be changed accordingly, a significant part of which are made in Brussels. Ecopreneur.eu is calling for fair framework conditions that favour sustainable companies and change the market accordingly through suitable tools such as EPR, taxes and levies. In short, that the transformation to a circular economy is ambitiously driven forward.

The transformation to a circular economy is one of the key challenges for the sustainable organisation of our economic and social system. We must ensure that the ideas, concepts and tools of the circular economy are implemented quickly and comprehensively in as many companies as possible. And all of us who want to play a part in this must join forces to generate the necessary momentum. The Circular Economy Forum Austria is the right platform for this.

Manfred Mühlberger