Worldwide innovation awards
Celebrating the leaders in circular economy and waste management technology
In the 1480s, following a devastating outbreak of plague in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned to design a new city. His proposal was extraordinary: a multi-level urban system. Pedestrian promenades occupied the upper tier. The level below, hidden from sight and accessible by a network of canals, handled the movement of goods, animals, water and waste through the city’s infrastructure. It was, among many other things, the first known attempt to design waste flows into urban planning from first principles: not as an afterthought to human settlement, but as a fundamental engineering problem to be solved at the level of the city’s architecture.
Leonardo understood what the linear city (then as now) refused to acknowledge: that every resource entering a system must eventually leave it, and that leaving the design of that exit to chance produces chaos, disease and loss. The appropriate response was to engineer the whole system, from input to output, as a deliberate act.
That insight is at the heart of the circular economy. Where the linear model takes, makes and disposes, the circular model asks a different question at every stage of a product’s life: what happens next to the materials this is made from? The answer — return them to productive use, at the highest possible value, for as long as possible — has become one of the organizing principles of a new industrial era. The DaVinci Awards® recognizes the organizations translating that principle into technology, products, platforms and processes with genuine commercial and environmental impact.
Worldwide innovation awards
how have you excelled?
The transition from a linear to a circular material economy is one of the most significant structural challenges facing global industry, and one of the most fertile grounds for technological innovation. The linear model worked when raw materials were cheap, waste disposal was unregulated and the environmental costs of extraction and landfill were externalized. None of those conditions holds today. Regulatory and commercial pressure to close material loops is growing rapidly across every major economy, and the organizations building the technology to do so are operating at the frontier of industrial innovation.
The DaVinci Awards® recognizes the full value chain of circular economy and waste management innovation. At the design end: the engineers and product developers creating goods that can be disassembled, repaired, remanufactured or recycled at end of life, and the packaging innovators developing materials that return cleanly to natural or technical cycles. At the collection and sorting end: the platforms, sensor systems and robotics enabling high-purity material recovery from mixed waste streams. At the processing end: the advanced recycling technologies (chemical, mechanical, biological) converting recovered materials into feedstocks of sufficient quality for demanding applications. And at the system level: the digital platforms, traceability tools and industrial symbiosis networks enabling organizations to find value in what the linear model called waste.
Entries are welcomed from organizations at every point in this value chain: material innovators, product designers, waste technology developers, platform builders, recycling process engineers, and companies creating new business models around remanufacturing, product-as-a-service and closed-loop supply chains. The award is equally interested in B2B industrial solutions and consumer-facing innovations that change how individuals interact with material recovery systems.
If your organization is helping to close the loop on linear consumption, through better materials, better processes, better products or better platforms, a DaVinci Award® could be yours.
Worldwide innovation awards
Areas of Interest
The DaVinci Awards® recognizes outstanding feats of human ingenuity and engineering innovation in circular economy and waste management technology. Entries are welcomed from individuals, teams, startups and established enterprises based anywhere in the world. Areas of interest include, but are certainly not limited to:
Impress the judges
Ingenuity of Approach
Circular economy innovation rarely involves a single discipline. It may require materials science, process chemistry, mechanical engineering, software development and business model redesign in combination, and the DaVinci Awards® panel assesses submissions across that full breadth. Show the thinking behind your innovation: what material, process or systemic challenge was addressed, why existing approaches were insufficient, and what decisions led to your solution. Entries demonstrating genuine originality — a chemical recycling process handling a previously unrecyclable material stream, a product design achieving full disassembly in a fraction of the time of its predecessor, a digital platform enabling material flows that were previously invisible to the market — will score strongly on this criterion. The panel is particularly attentive to the quality of the circularity claim itself: organizations that have thought rigorously about the full life cycle of their innovation, and can demonstrate that it genuinely closes a material loop rather than displacing a problem elsewhere in the system, will be assessed more favorably than those making broad sustainability claims without the engineering evidence to support them.
Impress the judges
The Problem Solved
Circular economy innovations address the gap between the material value locked in waste streams and the cost of recovering it — and the DaVinci Awards® wants to understand precisely what gap your innovation closes. Clearly explain the waste stream or material challenge you address, its scale, and why existing approaches left value on the table or material in landfill. Quantified impact data is central to a strong entry: tons of material diverted from disposal, recovery purity achieved, cost per ton of recovered material relative to virgin feedstock, carbon emissions avoided, water saved, or equivalent metrics appropriate to your innovation. Where your solution operates as part of a broader system — a sorting technology that enables a recycling process that enables a secondary material market, for instance — trace that chain of value clearly, since judges will assess the systemic contribution of your innovation alongside its immediate performance. For business model innovations — product-as-a-service, remanufacturing, industrial symbiosis platforms — explain the economic mechanism by which circularity is achieved, and provide evidence that it functions in practice, not merely in theory.
Impress the judges
Scalability & Legacy
The circular economy’s promise is systemic change at industrial scale, and the DaVinci Awards® is most interested in innovations with the potential to contribute to that change. Describe your innovation’s current deployment scale: pilot, regional, national or international. Explain what is required to scale, infrastructure investment, regulatory enablement, behavior change or technology cost reduction, and what progress has already been made. For technology platforms, describe the material streams, sectors or geographies addressable as the platform grows. For business model innovations, explain how the model scales economically: what the unit economics look like at volume, and what the principal barriers to wider adoption are. Entries demonstrating a clear-eyed understanding of the gap between current deployment and the scale at which the innovation would make a material difference to linear consumption patterns — together with a credible strategy for closing that gap — will score most strongly here. The DaVinci Awards® is interested in innovations that will still be recovering material, closing loops and displacing virgin resource consumption decades from now: the recycling process that becomes standard industrial practice, the design platform that changes how an entire product category is conceived, the traceability system that makes the circular supply chain as legible as the linear one.
Winners’ rewards
Promoting your success
Winners may make full use of The DaVinci Awards® hallmark of excellence, linked to your level of accreditation, on all relevant materials.
All winners also receive a DaVinci Awards® trophy, and substantial press opportunities working in partnership with our editorial team. Find out more.
