CEGE Students Are Winners in Waste to Base Materials Challenge

NASA Tournament Lab logo.
NASA Tournament Lab

Students from Michigan Tech’s Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering (CEGE) were recently selected as a winning team in the Waste to Base Materials Challenge, sponsored by HeroX and NASA.

Competing against teams from around the country, the CEGE students proposed a process to treat and repurpose human waste on a crewed mission to Mars. Over many iterations, they developed a resource recovery loop that integrated anaerobic digestion and harvesting microbe-produced plastic to generate a continuous material stream from onboard resources.

The MTU team includes two undergraduate students, Kathryn Krieger and Corbin Sullivan, and two graduate students, Azmat Naseem and Brian Rivers. The team was assembled and mentored by Audra Morse (CEGE).

By Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering.