Douglas Mulhall

Product Concepts & Systems Innovation

Douglas Mulhall co-founded the first NGO in South America dedicated to bio-nutrient recycling, the first international commercial television network in Ukraine, and co-developed the first City Hall in Europe designed to recover residual value from its materials. He co-developed product and systems innovations with companies like Carlsberg, where he co-founded the Carlsberg Circular Community, as well as Philips, Royal HaskoningDHV where he trained engineers in innovations like chemical leasing and Van Gansewinkel (see Wikipedia Nederland) where he co-developed a circular paper network. In related economic and environment initiatives his co-publication Criteria for Sustainable Development of Products and Production (Fresenius Env. Bulletin 2003) was one of the scientific publications used as a basis for the award-winning Cradle to Cradle Design Protocol. He supervised the TOP50 project, the first ranking of chemicals and pharmaceuticals companies by their positive environmental performance. In the nanotechnology field he researches and consults to startups on nano-therapies for pathological calcification since 2002, and co-published on the topic with Prof. H.Clark Anderson, the co-discoverer of membrane vesicles. In the urban development field he was the principle trainer for designers of the award-winning Backsippan pre-school in Ronneby, Sweden as well as the €45 million Venlo City Hall in Venlo The Netherlands. He co-developed the €10 million Buildings as Materials Banks initiative supported by Europe's Horizon 2020 program. His co-authored paper Resource Repletion, Role of Buildings in the Springer Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology, is being used as a basis for Materials Passports in the initiative. He continues system innovation today as a business developer consulting with the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency EPEA Internationale Umweltforschung GmbH, where he was Managing Director in the 1990s. Earlier he started up co-operative housing developments in Vancouver, Canada with Columbia Housing Advisory Association, which pioneered construction specifications for disabled residents.

Ecology Startups

O Instituto Ambiental (The Environmental Institute) is a Brazilian non-profit organization focusing on water recycling, mainly with integrated biosystems such as algae. The Institute was founded in 1993 by Mulhall, anti-poverty activist Waldemar Boff, chemist Michael Braungart, entrepreneur Valmir Fachini, and biological engineer Katja Hansen. The Institute also built facilities in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Spain. In Haiti, its bionutrient recycling systems were installed in co-operation with the award-winning NGO Viva Rio and by 2016 were servicing up to 10,000 residents who survived the 2009 earthquake. The systems use integrated agriculture pioneered by the late Prof. George Chan, and were co-designed with him. Mulhall collaborated with Prof. Chan to build pilot projects in Dongguan, China and Brazil, and managed a European Commission sponsored initiative proving the systems are capable of recycling nutrients while cleaning wastewater to European discharge standards at a fraction the cost of traditional methods. Results were published in Water, Environment & Technology. The United Nations Environment Programme and European Commission Environment Directorate General supported the technology. Earlier Mulhall was an international board member of Greenpeace and co-founded Greenpeace Italy, Argentina, and Moscow as well as being the director and co-founder of the Children of Chernobyl initiative developed by Greenpeace to train doctors for the purpose of treating victims of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown.

Journalism & Media

Mulhall has been published or interviewed by hundreds of media including CNN, National Post, Die Zeit, and The Futurist. He co-founded and was first General Director of the first international joint venture television and radio networks in Ukraine, ICTV (Ukraine) which pioneered broadcasting of western environmental and science documentaries in the former USSR before being taken over by other business groups. He started his career as Communications Director of Co-operative Union of Canada, Canada's national association of Co-operatives, writing and editing diverse works including Co-ops and the Poor, a compendium of co-operative initiatives to support lower income Canadians.

Mulhall has authored and edited diverse publications on environment, business, and medicine. He is the principal author of reports on the Circular Economy for the Ministry of the Economy of Luxembourg and the European Investment Bank, as well as publications by the EC Environment Directorate on bionutrient recycling in tropical regions. He authored Our Molecular Future: How Nanotechnology, Robotics, Genetics, and Artificial Intelligence will transform our world, released in 2002 by Prometheus Books, and co-authored The Calcium Bomb: The Nanobacteria Link to Heart Disease and Cancer. He co-authored Cradle to Cradle Criteria for the Built Environment, is a contributing editor to the Guide to Cradle-to-Cradle-inspired Business sites, a contributing author to the book Sustainable Cities, and earlier contributed to the book Green Business Opportunities released by the Financial Times. He is also contributed to publications on The Circular Economy by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Mulhall has co-produced several documentaries, such as Breaking the Nuclear Chain, a documentary which follows the global uranium network and was a recipient of the Cambridge Forum Award. His investigations into pathological calcification were the focus of the first international documentary on the topic, 'Dangerous Calcium?' 'Gefährliches Calcium? Der schlimmst en Volkskrankheit auf der Spur' broadcast by the Arte network. Calcification characterizes most of the diseases of aging including diabetes, heart disease and arthritis.

Academic Positions

Mulhall was senior researcher at the Cradle to Cradle Chair, Rotterdam School of Management, and Rudolph Diesel Fellow researcher at Technical University of Munich (TUM). He is presently associate researcher at Delft University of Technology and TUM. He has lectured extensively on product and systems innovation.