Applications now open for Wege Prize 2025

From now until October 6, 2024, applications may be submitted for Wege Prize 2025, an international student design competition where top teams have a chance to win a monetary prize for their sustainable, circular approaches to solving problems in pollution, hunger, waste and more.

Organized by the Wege Center for Sustainable Design at Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University (KCAD), Wege Prize is an annual competition that aims to create solutions for the future by inspiring college and university students across the globe to collaborate in teams across institutional, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries to redesign products and systems for a more circular economy.

Since 2013, Wege Prize has advanced students’ work worldwide for a more sustainable future with the support of The Wege Foundation. The competition’s teams identify problems to address and develop solutions by helping accelerate the transition to a circular economy, providing unique value and exploring potential through innovation.

Additionally, this is done by demonstrating the potential for marketability, profitability, and financial sustainability and exhibiting research, user consideration, and affected communities in all aspects of the solution’s design.

Wege Prize winners in the past few years included Canadian students addressing the issue of e-waste by extracting valuable rare earth elements (REEs), U.S. students with an innovative wastewater treatment technique to extract raw materials for reuse, and African students with a charcoal cooling concept that slashes post-harvest losses for vegetable farmers.

Throughout the nine-month process, five-person teams compete to advance through the competition’s four phases, and turn their ideas into real-world solutions informed by research, market analysis, prototyping and testing.

During each phase, feedback from industry experts helps the teams strenghten their ideas. The five selected finalist teams will then present their ideas next May, with each of the winning teams sharing in the competition’s $65,000 USD prize pool.

For more information or to apply, visit www.wegeprize.org/apply.

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