Wege Prize has announced 32 student teams advancing new, real-world solutions addressing global challenges from hunger and pollution to social equity and climate change. The students, hailing from around the world, offer new proof of the impact and benefits of Wege Prize, the innovation competition they are vying to win in 2023.
Wege Prize, the international student design competition to create circular solutions to today’s “wicked problems,” is an agent of change for these lofty ambitions. The 2023 competitor applications have gone through multiple stages of review with feedback from judges. The judges then narrowed down the original field of 60-plus teams to 32 teams now developing their circular economy ideas even further for a chance to make it into the next round, the semifinals.
Examples of the international teams include the North American group Banana Leather, with five students from Yale University studying environment, business, green chemistry and energy. “Our solution looks to create plant-based leather from crop waste – mainly the banana stem, which is left on fields to decay – making it a sustainable, environmentally friendly and cruelty-free alternative,” the team wrote in their submission, promising carbon emission savings, water pollution avoidance, livestock protections, and upcycling of crop waste.
From Sawdust to Sanitary Pads
Other competitors include the Cellucoat team from the University of Calgary in Canada, which is developing sustainable, antimicrobial food packaging made of cellulose that offers a replacement for petroleum-based plastic and addresses the twin problems of food waste and plastics disposal. Similarly, another team from three universities in Rwanda dubbed Ecosol Fashion utilizes sawdust, household food waste, and discarded coffee grounds to grow fungus mycelium for production of packaging and textile materials.
Another team from Rwanda, Green Period Promoters, wrote, “Our project aims to produce eco-friendly, affordable, and biodegradable sanitary pads from banana fibers by using what people call ‘waste’ that could instead help people to have safer periods.” The group addresses a significant issue of equity, too: In Rwanda, 18 percent of women and girls missed school and employment last year due to a lack of money for menstrual pads, as well as the 10 percent of African females on school leave during their periods — four missed days per month, which the team calls “a huge loss of educational time.”
Other 2023 teams competing to share the purse of $65,000 USD offered by Wege Prize include a team called Kenda addressing malnutrition in Kenyan communities by promoting and seed-banking African indigenous vegetables, known as AIVs. A team hailing from Costa Rica, Muddy Treasure, has conceived a plant-based process turning sewage sludge into electricity, heat and a biofertilizer while also helping restore aquatic ecosystems. Another, Tyre Tech, envisions the 3D printing of tire treads using bio-friendly materials, while a Scottish and North American entrant, Unwaste Water, employs microbial electrosynthesis to transform wastewater into a viable commercial product and industrial feedstock.
“This year we are seeing not only a much larger field of competitors in Wege Prize but also a consistently elevated quality of ideas in the 2023 entries, which is good news for the environment and for the economy,” says Gayle DeBruyn, KCAD’s award-winning professor of Collaborative Design and Wege Prize principal organizer.
In all, 160 student competitors in over 100 fields from geography and mathematics to agribusiness and biotechnology are engaged in the next phase of this year’s edition, the biggest ever for Wege Prize. The countries represented cover four continents, including Sweden, South Africa, Poland, Pakistan, India, Ghana, China and England, among others.
Game-Changing Solutions: Wege Prize
Wege Prize was established in 2013 to solve the most complex, layered problems. The competition requires teams of individuals capable of working across the barriers that too often divide us — to drive systems-level change. “KCAD’s prize offers a powerful and accessible platform for any college or university student in the world to develop tangible solutions that often find real-world acceptance and application after the competition concludes,” says KCAD’s DeBruyn.
Many Wege Prize competitors have built their ideas into successful ventures. Among the program’s notable achievers is the 2022 finalist team SCUP Aquaculture, which has just been shortlisted by the prestigious Moonshot Awards. From the 2021 competition, the Chilensis team has been recognized for its sound isolators made from discarded palm leaves to ease invasive indoor noise pollution in Chile. In addition, the 2020 Wege Prize winner Hya Bioplastics was accepted into a prestigious incubator and has advanced their business. Another team from 2019, Rutopia created concepts for eco-sensitive tourism that garnered the attention of top editors at Forbes, among others.
For a full list of teams for Wege Prize 2023 accepted into the next phase of competition, visit wegeprize.org. More details about Wege Prize 2022 will be revealed in the coming weeks on wegeprize.org.