Aim higher, from just carbon neutrality towards closing the loop by jan-k

Please find below the judging results for your proposal.

Semi-Finalist Evaluation

Judges'' comments

SUBJECT: Your proposal in the Climate CoLab
Proposal: Aim higher, from just carbon neutrality towards closing the loop
Contest: Atypical Ideas for Carbon Neutrality
Thank you for your contest entry. We appreciate your willingness to share your ideas and also the time and effort you put into developing a proposal and submitting it to the contest.
We, the Judges, have strongly considered your proposal and found that it contained intriguing elements; however, we have chosen to not advance it to the next round of competition. We had many excellent proposal and are not able to advance all the entries that promising potential. Your proposal had many great ideas that resonated with us.
We encourage you to keep developing your idea. Transfer your proposal to the Proposal Workspace to re-open it, make edits, add collaborators, and even submit it into a future contest. You can do so by logging into your account, opening your proposal, selecting the Admin tab, and clicking “Move proposal”.
We welcome you to stay involved in the Climate CoLab community: support and comment on proposals that have been named Semi-Finalists and finalists, and even volunteer to join one those teams if you have relevant expertise. During the voting period, you can help select the contest’s Popular Choice Winner. The Climate CoLab will be opening more contests in the coming months, and you are welcome to submit your proposals to those contests as well.
Below this note you will find some feedback from our judges—we hope you find this interesting and insightful.
We are honored to have your contribution as part of our innovative search for ways of making Somerville carbon neutral by 2050. We hope that by working together, we all can create solutions that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
2015 Climate CoLab Judges

A whole carbon neutrality system--very interesting. In Somerville we're very interested in systems thinking. How does this work in a City that is so interconnected with its neighbors?

You are correct that Sweden is on the forefront of circular thinking - using outputs as inputs, over and over again. I understand Hammarsby to be the prime example of the circular approach. Somerville is a small, densely populated suburb of Boston that is 4.1 squ miles or 43 squ kilometers and is about 79,000 people. Somerville does not have its own sewage treatment plant; it is served by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority which completed a $9 billion project in the the year 2000 to treat water and digest sludge. The Deer Island plant generates bio-gas which is used to power its internal operations. However, your point is taken. Circular. With this proposal, you need to apply circular thinking on a smaller scale - perhaps focusing on green roofs, stormwater catchment systems, and urban composting? The main difficulty is that Somerville is too small for larger systems' cycles and facilities. The state of Massachusetts would be a better comparison if you wanted to apply lessons from Sweden to an area of the U.S.

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