About Us

WERC History

The WERC Environmental Design Contest has a rich 35-year history at New Mexico State University.

The WERC Environmental Design Contest was established in 1991 as one facet of the "Waste-management Research Consortium" (WERC). The consortium was a joint effort between the Department of Energy, Sandia National Labs, New Mexico State University, University of New Mexico, and Dine College. This was a progressive new engineering program having the primary goal of teaching engineering students how to manage and prevent waste.

WERC Today

The design contest lives on in the WERC legacy. We have broadened our scope and are much more than a waste-management program. We invite students from across the country to design engineering systems that address the Water, Energy, and Climate Nexus. In addition to managing waste, students are now focusing their designs on minimizing energy & waste and conserving & recycling resources, including water, energy, and natural resources. We will reveal the new meaning of the W-E-R-C acronym this Spring.

The WERC Environmental Design Contest is a unique design competition that unites industry, government, and academia in search for solutions to today’s environmental challenges in ALL fields of engineering.

WERC invites undergraduate engineering students from across the United States and abroad to experience the steps required to answer an engineering Request for Proposals (RFP). Design challenges (“tasks”) are selected to address emerging areas of environmental concern across a broad spectrum of engineering disciplines. The tasks are designed by our partners in industry and government agencies to reflect real-world parameters, and they are open-ended to leave opportunity for innovation and creativity.

Our Model: The RFP

Students take the lead as consulting engineers answering an engineering Request for Proposals, developing an entrepreneurial mindset as they work in teams to solve challenging tasks.They report their findings through research papers, oral presentations, and functioning bench-scale demonstrations.

Since 1991, the competition has been held annually at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, drawing hundreds of college students from throughout the United States and around the world. Many professors return year after year because of the unique opportunities for their students.

Students:

Solve real-world environmental problems.
Work as consulting engineers answering an RFP.
Build fully operational bench-scale models.
Develop teamwork and entrepreneurial skills.
Improve writing and oral communication skills.
Prepare research papers with the chance to publish in IEEE Conference Proceedings.
Learn from judges–the top environmental professionals in their field.
Network with experts from academia, government, and industry.
Come from ALL fields of engineering.
Win awards and cash prizes totaling over $30k each year.