FabCafe Global and Loftwork Inc. are proud to announce the 35 winning projects of the crQlr Awards (“Circular” Awards) 2022, an award that gathers circular economy projects and ideas from around the world.
The crQlr Awards, which are celebrating their second edition this year, are based on three criteria: “Circular, not linear” “Action, not prestige,” and “Gain from global perspectives”. In addition, a Special Prize, the “FabCafe Global Prize,” has been newly established to honor bottom-up activities aimed at empowering communities around the world.
The call for entries, which was open for approximately two and a half months, attracted 131 projects from companies, organizations, start-ups, designers, and other groups and institutions from 30 countries around the world.
I would first like to express my sincere appreciation to all of the applicants of the crQlr Awards 2022 and to the judges for their expertise and support. Connecting the dots in the circular economy requires creativity and transformative partnerships, both of which we could see reflected in this year’s crQlr Awards winner’s works.
This year, we celebrate diverse projects where grassroots thinking, traceability, and transparency were key factors in identifying opportunities in the circular value chain. Winners included purpose-driven waste-to-resource works, clever integration of modular technologies, enriching educational and artistic experiences, and cutting-edge methods for carbon capturing leading to new value-creation.
The crQlr Awards 2022 winners represent to me harbingers of a more open, fair, and circular society. I invite everyone to dig deep into and connect with this year’s winner for lessons, hints, and new opportunities in this growing circular society.
Comment from Kotaro Iwaoka, FabCafe Global Prize judge / FabCafe founding member and CEO of Hidakuma Co.
First of all, we’d like to express our huge gratitude to all those who entered. All of the judges learned so much through the process of reviewing this year’s entries. I hope this helps to fulfill the purpose of the Special Prize, which is to spotlight bottom-up activities aimed at solving community issues and make them more widely known. Overall, there appear to be so many initiatives around waste, particularly in food and clothing. This points to a strong sense of crisis: we have yet to escape the system of mass production and consumption, even when we should be accelerating the shift to a circular economy.
Because most crQlr Award entries meet the first and third criteria “Leverage Local Resources” and “Regenerate Natural Resources”, the Special Prize focuses on the second: “Started and Sustained by the Community”. Three of this year’s Special Prize winners take different community-led approaches. Fair, Circular Solar Panel builds communities through open-source development. Sargablock revives communities by transforming local issues into opportunities. Nihon Kusaki Lab collaborates with communities by setting up laboratories in local areas. And a fourth Special Prize winner, Casa Gallina, aims to sustain communities by means of education rather than material circulation, reminding us that circularity goes beyond thinking about resources.
We award these four projects a Special Prize because they each have something to teach us about how bottom-up approaches can comprehensively solve local issues.
You can see all the winning projects from the crQlr Awards page here.
Please take a look at the variety of projects from around the world.
Interested in exploring circular design with us? It all starts right here!
