About

Competition details

The CircularCityChallenge is a Pan-European contest for ideas on circular interventions in students’ local environments. This challenge empowers young people to make the world a better place by proposing innovative and sustainable solutions that support a circular way of living.
Key dates

Deadline for submissions: Tuesday, 15th of October, 2024, 24:00 CET

Announcement of winners: Friday, 8th of November, 2024, 15:00 CET

Who can participate?

The contest is open to all pupils and students between the ages of 14 and 19 across Europe. They are encouraged to participate as a team with fellow students (maximum team size: 3 students), but can also submit individually, without a team. Team members may be of various age, and cross-class collaboration is welcomed.

The evaluation of the submissions will be held in three categories to account for different levels of education and guidance:

  1. Open submissions I: submissions by university students between the ages of 18 and 19
  2. Open submissions II: submissions by school pupils between the ages of 14 and 17
  3. Guided submissions: Guided submissions by workshop participants in the partner countries Spain, Austria, Romania and the Netherlands.
The prize structure for the competition
•  Category 1: One team will be selected as the winner and will be awarded €600.
•  Category 2: One team will be selected as the winner and will be awarded €600.
•  Category 3: We will have four winning teams in each participating country, each receiving a prize of €600.
We wish all teams the best of luck and look forward to celebrating your innovative ideas!
What to submit?

Two files are required to submit the “intervention” on the online platform:

  1. FILE 1: Explanation of the “intervention” and reflection on its possible future impact. Tell a story about how the idea shifted the system toward making cities more sustainable, more liveable, more inclusive, and more future-proof. Format: A video, presentation (pdf/pptx), comic, text document or similar.
  2.  
  3. Your “interventions” can be either an Action or a Plan:
  4.  
  5. Action (real-world project): For instance, building a prototype, performing a campaign, programming an app, changing a product cycle, conducting an event and many more possibilities.
  6.  
  7. Plan (proposal for action): For instance, designing a product, sketching an alternative production process, planning a political measure, formulating a law, and many more options.
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  9. FILE 2: A journal of the process and experiences when developing the “intervention”. Tell us how you identified the problem, who you contacted, whom you asked for help, and what you learned personally or as a group about circularity, collaboration, and the needs of other people involved in circularity issues. For this purpose, you can use the logbook or create a video, photo, text journal, or similar. Through these submission formats, we would like to understand your idea and its potential benefits as well as to learn from your team experience. We don’t expect professional videos or sophisticated texts but are interested in your ideas!

Please submit the ideas in English language. If this is not possible, please use AI translator tools to translate your submission, and submit both versions.

  1. Feel free to experiment – the creativity and possible impact of your idea is more important to us than the professionality of the submission.
What are the prizes?

Prizes for the winning teams:

There will be one winning team per category: open submissions I, open submissions II, guided submissions Spain, guided submissions Austria, guided submissions Romania & guided submissions the Netherlands). Each winning team will receive a winning certificate and 600€!

Prizes for all participants:

1. Feedback on each submission
2. Certificate for Circularity Education!
3. Featuring of teams’ submissions on the CCC platform.
4. Access to education and career options in circular economy with a certificate of participation.
6. Membership in the “Circularity Heroes” online community, where participants can present themselves and connect to likeminded peers to jointly act for change.
7. Networking opportunities with consortium members & prominent actors in circular economy.

Participants of guided submissions will be invited to local in-person award ceremonies.

What are the evaluation criteria? 

1. UNDERSTANDING URBAN CIRCULARITY: How well does the team display a basic understanding of circularity and the circular economy within complex urban systems of production and consumption?

2. UNDERSTANDING INTER-CONNECTIVITY: How well does the team understand of general landscape (key actors, organizations, initiatives), determine who needs to be involved, map the relationships, roles and information flow in the system, identify opportunities to build new relationships, and explore other parts of the system?

3. SEEING OPPORTUNITIES FOR CIRCULARITY: How well does the team represent the problem in their environment and address this problem, establish objectives through cooperation, and find ways to achieve those objectives via circular actions?

4. CONVINCING THE JURY ABOUT THEIR ANALYSIS AND PROPOSAL: How well does the team present their overall analysis, which includes the problem, actors, cooperation, and their final proposal for the problem they defined?

What does the evaluation process look like?

Open submissions I & II: All open submissions are going to be rated by the CCC jury along the criteria stated above.

Guided submissions: All submissions by guidance workshop participants in the partner countries Spain, Austria, Romania and the Netherlands will be evaluated by local juries.