Huge concepts for making the world higher can earn huge cash for faculty and college college students.
Now by October fifth, functions are open for Wege Prize 2026, the worldwide design competitors the place prime groups win a prize pool of $65,000 USD for his or her sustainable, round approaches to fixing a few of as we speak’s largest issues in air pollution, starvation, waste and extra.
Wege Prize winners up to now few years included African college students with a charcoal cooling idea that slashes post-harvest losses for vegetable farmers, U.S. college students with an modern wastewater remedy approach to extract uncooked supplies for reuse, and a multinational workforce turning India’s banana crop waste into a modern fake leather-based.
Have an thrilling concept to share? See particulars at www.wegeprize.org/apply.
About Wege Prize 2026
Organized by the Wege Middle for Sustainable Design at Ferris State College’s Kendall School of Artwork and Design (KCAD), Wege Prize is an annual competitors that ignites game-changing options for the longer term by inspiring school and college college students worldwide to collaborate in groups throughout institutional, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries to revamp merchandise and techniques for a extra round financial system.
With the assist of The Wege Basis, since 2013 Wege Prize has superior college students’ work worldwide for a extra sustainable future. The competitors’s multidisciplinary, five-person groups establish a “depraved drawback” to deal with and develop a compelling new options — merchandise, companies, techniques, and extra — that construct on core rules of the round financial system by:
- Serving to speed up the transition to a round financial system and a shift in the direction of renewables.
- Offering distinctive worth and exploring untapped potential by innovation.
- Demonstrating the potential for marketability, profitability, and monetary sustainability.
- Exhibiting analysis, consumer consideration, and affected communities in all features of the answer’s design.
Through the nine-month course of, the five-person groups compete to advance by the competitors’s 4 phases, rising their concepts from casual proposals into real-world options knowledgeable by analysis, market evaluation, prototyping and testing. At every section, free suggestions and steering from specialists in sustainable enterprise, design, the round financial system, supplies, and extra assist the groups strengthen their concepts for real-world functions. Then, 5 chosen finalist groups will current their game-changing concepts subsequent Could, with every of the profitable groups sharing within the competitors’s $65,000 USD prize pool.
Final 12 months, Wege Prize encompassed an preliminary pool of 90 competing groups in various educational disciplines representing 31 nations together with Costa Rica, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Kenya, Hong Kong SAR, Spain and India, in addition to instructional establishments in England and the USA.
Be taught to use! Go to www.wegeprize.org/apply for all the main points.
By collaborating, designing, planning, and testing, the groups’ profitable options earn extensive consideration within the information media and are acknowledged by their establishments.
Photographs for publication are at we.tl/t-4R4Z67KWmQ.