In December 1995 Ab was appointed as a part-time professor in Environmental Design at Delft University of Technology. He was visiting professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department of Stanford University, in the fall of 2001 he was teaching at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the TU Berlin, in 2002 he was visiting the School of Industrial Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta) .In 2003 he was a visiting professor at the Industrial Ecology Program at NTN University in Trondheim, Norway and in 2005 at Tsinghua University in Beijing. This was followed by horter stays at Hong Kong Polytechnic in 2006 and TU Ostrava (Czech Republic) in 2007. 

Ab Stevels has done trailblazing work in making EcoDesign into day-to-day business really happen and has researched in detail the setting up of take-back and recycling systems for electronics for these purposes tools and management procedures have been developed which have proven their strength through their practical success. Ab is the author of some 180 journal articles and conference contributions. Training courses on applied EcoDesign have been held at various universities (Delft, Stanford, TU Berlin,TU Vienna, TU Ostrava, the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham (UK) , Mexico City, Hong Kong Poly, NTNU), Tsinghua University, and at various Philips departments and divisions around the globe and at other companies. For his work in EcoDesign he got an honorary degree from the University of Arts and Design. For his contributions in the field of recycling of electronics he got the "Cowbell Award" from the International Electronics Recycling Conference Organization.