The Bureau of International Recycling (BIR), Brussels, has announced that the keynote session Tuesday, 31 May 2016 at its 2016 World Recycling Convention will feature Klaus Töpfer, a German government minister, handling portfolios such as environmental protection, town planning and construction, and the executive director of UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme.
From 1998 until 2006 Töpfer worked as executive director of the UN Environment Programme, based in Kenya, and as general director of the UN Nairobi office. After retiring from the UN, Töpfer started working as professor of environment and sustainable development at Tongji University in Shanghai.
From 2001 until 2010, he was a member of the German Council for Sustainable Development (Rat für Nachhaltige Entwicklung). In 2009 he became founding director of the German Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, IASS, and in 2010 Töpfer acted as Shanghai's advisor on the topic "future city" for Expo 2010.
The German government installed the Commission for Assured Energy Supply (Ethikkommission für Sichere Energieversorgung) and assigned the chairmanship to Klaus Töpfer following the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in 2011.
Töpfer’s early career saw him take a position in the state government of Saarland as the head of the planning department. He lectured at several colleges while pursuing development projects in Africa, the Middle East and South America. A member of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) party, he served as chairman of the party in Saarland and was a member of the German government from 1990-1998.
In the 1970s he served as minister for environment and health in Rheinland-Pfalz. In 1985 he joined the government of Helmut Kohl as minister for environment and reactor safety. When the government move from Bonn to Berlin ran into severe problems, in 1994 he became the minister for construction and carried specific responsibility for the government move.
At the BIR event, Töpfer will deliver a presentation titled “Life Cycle Economy - Central Importance for a Successful Climate Policy and for Sustainable Development.”