The thirty proposals currently under consideration have undergone a rigorous review for adherence to the entry criteria including an interview with the individual or team behind the strategy. They were advanced from a pool of 215 entries submitted. The titles and project leads of these entries are listed below. The jury will spend the next two months reviewing the entries and determining finalists.
SEMI-FINALISTS for the 2010 BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE
(in the order they were submitted)
| # | Project Title | Name | 50 Word Summary from the Entrant |
| 1 | Watergy Greenhouse | Martin Buchholz, Inventor and Initiator of Watergy | Watergy is a bionic concept, immitating the biosphere within an enclosure, using wind, rain and related energy dissipation. It allows 85% recycling of irrigation water, while accumulation of CO2 leads to higher rates of photosynthesis. Further applications are plant protection (no pesticides), processing of greywater, desalination and heat supply. |
| 2 | Aclima: A system for creating and harnessing collective eco-intelligence for cleaner air and reduced climate change emissions | Antero Garcia, Davida Herzl, Reza Naima, Greg Niemeyer | Aclima implements a bottom-up approach to monitoring and managing air pollution and GHG emissions. Our distributed system relies upon and empowers individuals to measure air, as opposed to the current institutional approach. Leveraging affordable sensors, cloud-computing, crowdsourcing, and social networks, our system enables transformation at personal, community and global scales. |
| 3 | Barefoot Women Solar Engineers of Africa, Asia and Latin America | Bunker Roy of The Barefoot College, Tilonia, Rajasthan, India | The Barefoot approach has reached remote rural inaccessible villages in 15 of the least developed countries in Africa. Illiterate rural mothers and grandmothers who have never left their villages in their lives within 6 months of training (without using the written word) in India have solar electrified their own villages. |
| 4 | GrowTown: It's for Everyone - It's Sustainable - It Starts Now | Beth Hagenbuch Kenneth Weikal Stephen Deak David Peterhans Danny Bulemore | GrowTown is a non-profit organization dedicated to enabling neighborhoods, left fragmented in post-industrial cities and landscapes, to self-organize. Through grassroots community-driven design and local leadership, the Local Food Economy is the catalyst for growing resilient and sustainable neighborhoods that can respond to the important challenges of our time. |
| 5 | Operation Hope - Permanent water and food security for Africa's impoverished millions | Allan Savory on behalf of Africa Centre for Holistic Management Trustees and staff | This project demonstrates how to reverse desertification of the world's savannas and grasslands, thereby contributing enormously to mitigating climate change, biomass burning, drought, flood, drying of rivers and underground waters, disappearing wildlife, massive poverty, social breakdown, violence and genocide. |
| 6 | Jaaga | Freeman Murray Archana Prasad Matias Echanove Rahul Srivastava | We design and market pallet rack based housing kits which provide the urban poor and disaster relief organizations with inexpensive high density shelter & services. Our systems are extremely modular, can be erected and disassembled very quickly, and have a positive environmental impact on the land upon which they rest. |
| 7 | Tibet is the High Ground - 3rd Variation | Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison | The work "Tibet is the High Ground III" proposes an ecologically conceived resolution to the present de-glaciation and subsequent catastrophic outcomes to the 2.5 million square kilometer Tibetan Plateau and the seven major rivers that flow from it through Asia, a bio-cultural approach at the scale of the problem. |
| 8 | The Acceleration Of Innovation | Jeff Rose- Executive Director Jock Brandis-Director of Research and Development | The Full Belly Project (FBP) – Acceleration of Innovation Program empowers the entrepreneurial poor by training them to manufacture and sell locally produced low-cost technologies. Simple technolgoies catalyze change by creating new businesses, increasing household income, increasing efficiency, improving the environment and improving health. |
| 9 | Seed-Scale: A Universal Process for Community Change | Daniel Taylor, President of Future Generations Carl E. Taylor, Professor Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Senior Health Advisor for Future Generations | There are no universal solutions for cultural, economic, and ecological sustainability, but there is a universal process to identify local solutions. The Seed-Scale process enables communities to gather their own human energies and invent sustainable solutions that expand to more communities. |
| 10 | Sheltering U.S. Persons Unsheltered: Creating Legally Conforming, Economically Sustainable Emergency and Transitional Shelter | Bruce LeBel, Executive Director, World Shelters Steven Elias, Co-Founder, World Shelters | World Shelters' mission is to provide temporary and transitional shelter for persons in need, including persons unsheltered in the U.S., a.k.a. "homeless". We have developed an economically sustainable, jurisdictionally conforming and technically unique design for emergency and transitional shelter that we propose to demonstrate in three jurisdictions in California. |
| 11 | LIFT | Prithula Prosun | The design solution addresses the critical need of low cost housing to provide shelter for the rising number of slum inhabitants in flood prone areas. With the alarming rate of urbanization along with projected effects of global warming, flood protection will soon be a necessity for many low income communities. |
| 12 | Sustainable Disaster Response | Scott Gibson, Eric Klein, Simon Draper, Alissa Sears | Sustainable Disaster Response, SDR, is an integrated, sustainable disaster response and recovery system that utilizes available people and resources to implement innovative renewable energy solutions that transform tragedy into sustainable community reconstruction. SDR uses disasters time of change to maximize efforts towards building a sustainable future. |
| 13 | Synchronicity 2: Public Water Purification Island | Jakub Szczesny | The island is a floating platform with nine outdoor fitness machines pumping polluted Vistula water through four filters to a basin placed in the center of the island giving drinkable water. The platform will be floating on Vistula river in the center of Warsaw. |
| 14 | ColaLife | Simon Berry | ColaLife harnesses sea-changes in corporate social responsibility and mobile-based micro-payments, proposing its AidPod distribution system, allowing local health agencies to make simple low-cost life-saving health supplies and awareness materials, ubiquitous, well-understood and easily available in the developing world, over-coming current transport, logistical and commercial barriers. |
| 15 | Plastic Island | Mr. F. K. R. Eilander Mr. D. J. Den Hartog | The goal of the Plastic Island Project is to use the existing Great Pacific Garbage Patch that was discovered twelve years ago by Charles Moore, to develop a self-sustaining island inhabited by around 800 people that will collect and recycle the tons of plastic floating around our oceans. |
| 16 | Fighting SAM (Severe Acute Malnutrition) in India | Compatible Technology International | Produce shelf stable, high energy, high protein ready to eat food products suitable for community-based treatment of Severe Acute Malnutrition for children under 5 years old. We will utilize locally available ingredients and transfer the technology to women-led local self help groups and small scale enterprises to promote self sufficiency. |
| 17 | GoodBank - a high transparency design for ethical banking | Bruce Cahan, President of Urban Logic (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit) | GoodBank is the high transparency design for a commercial bank, reconnecting money and meaning. Saving, shopping and investing true to one’s ethical values improves customer's credit rating at the bank, earns cash-back rewards for environmental and social causes, and inspires new transparency tools to enhance social financial literacy. |
| 18 | Resources | Elizabeth Damon | Re-Sources: Saving Living Systems: a replicable, multi-disciplinary, integrated-systems project addressing ecological degradation and cultural genocide. Phase one is the rich, undocumented water culture in the Tibetan areas of Western Sichuan. With grassroots, collaborative strategies, we will use the roots of this culture to teach sustainable practices for economic survival. |
| 19 | CITYSINK | Denise Hoffman Brandt | CITYSINK is a meta-park of dispersed landscape Infrastructure boosting carbon stocks in both short - term biomass storage and through formation of long- term sequestration reservoirs for soil organic carbon in New York City. Urban-landscape is reshaped into apparatus, empowering citizens to affect global ecologies through civic practice. |
| 20 | MicroEnergy Credits | April Allderdice, James Dailey | MicroEnergy Credits leverages the unprecedented growth of the $120 billion carbon markets as a catalytic source of funding to mobilize the 12,000 microfinance banks now reaching over a billion people, to help their microentrepreneurs affordably switch to healthy and clean energy sources as part of their journey out of poverty. |
| 21 | Living Building Challenge | Jason F. McLennan and Eden Brukman | The Living Building Challenge is a visionary strategy for creating a socially just, culturally rich and ecologically benign built environment. Rather than providing points for incremental improvements in building performance, it measures success against the end goal of true sustainability and provides a framework for restoring balance in the human ecosystem. |
| 22 | Eco-Boulevards | Martin Felsen + Sarah Dunn | Chicagoans discard over one billion gallons of Great Lakes water per day. This "wastewater" never replenishes one of the world's most vital resources. As a remedy, this project re-conceives the Chicago street-grid as a holistic Bio-System that captures, cleans and returns wastewater and storm-water to the Lakes via "Eco-Boulevards." |
| 23 | The Green Initiative: Self-Sufficiency for NGOs through Clean Energy | Dr. Basil Stamos, Social Investor John Tucker, CEO, Co-founder of New Hope for Cambodian Children (NHCC) Tim Waterfield, Chief Technology Officer for TGI Richard Cook, Partner Cook + Fox Architects | The Green Initiative is a social venture to increase the self-sufficiency of NGOs in the developing world through clean, affordable, reliable, and sustainable fuels. By allowing participants to simultaneously control operating costs and reduce dependence on fossil fuels, this solution reinforces the NGO network and represents a new model of financial and energy independence. |
| 24 | New York City (Steady) State (book, research, web project) | Terreform Inc. | New York City (Steady) State is an alternative plan for New York City based on a single predicate: it is possible for the city to become almost entirely self-sufficient within its political boundaries. At its conclusion, our project will have proven this and outlined the necessary steps to achieve it. |
| 25 | Light For All | Sameer Hajee | Reduce global CO2 emissions and light up rural households in developing countries by distributing an innovative and affordable lighting system to replace fuel-based lighting. The design and delivery model of Nuru Portable-on-demand (POD) lights, using human power to recharge, allows a greater reach and more immediate environmental impact than other lighting solutions. |
| 26 | The Green Island Project | Skip Staats, Dr. Tama Copeman, Glenn Rambach, Conrad Oakey, Valerie Kausen | Green Island Project is an isolated (or isolatable) municipality that meets some or all of its energy needs from local renewable sources. A post-industrial energy ecosystem that creates local jobs while reducing fossil fuel dependence, an opportunity to innovate next-generation sustainable infrastructures outside of the restrictions of legacy industrial models. |
| 27 | The S.A.T. Project, 4D City concept | Architects Jorge Serrano, Norma A. Pecorari, Valeria Serrano and Alejo Serrano, Sofia Serrano | Megacities around the world are at a crossroads, regarding climate change, sustainability of the built environment and urban gridlocks. The concept of 3D Transportation builds the technological platform to rethink the present concept of cities. S.A.T. PROJECT is the first mass public-private 3D Transportation system for people & freight in the world. |
| 28 | A Call to Farm : FarmShare | BK Farmyards | FarmShare reconnects farmers and consumers as co-producers of the foodscape. The strategy uses social media to pool all the resources of Brooklyn into a crowd-sourced decentralized farm. Voting for local food with their forks already, Brooklyn food activists will pool their time and their waste in A Call to Farm. |
| 29 | Samasource: Microwork for the Developing World | Leila C. Janah | Samasource enables marginalized people to receive life-changing work opportunities via the Internet. We provide microwork, technology's answer to microfinance. By training women, youth and refugees to complete paying remote tasks, we give them the ability to build livelihoods and become part of the digital economy. |
| 30 | STRUCTURES FOR WAVE ENERGY ABSORPTION AND COLONIZATION OF MANGROVES | The Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology | The research will test geosynthetic landscape systems to support human development in tropical regions simultaneous to critical mangrove biological processes. The interconnected structural networks are intended to facilitate ecosystem recovery, dissipate catastrophic storm impact, mitigate erosion and enable large-scale building development to co-exist with restorative mangrove-type vegetation. |
