Contact: David Kauffman, 277-7964 Media Contact: Michael Padilla, 277-1816

March 13, 2003 UNM engineering students to confront environmental problems through international competition School of Engineering students from the University of New Mexico will compete among 66 teams from around the world at the 13th Annual Environmental Design Contest April 6-10 at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The week-long competition, sponsored by WERC: A Consortium for Environmental Education and Technology Development, will include two teams from India, one from China, another from Mexico and a team from Canada along with others from across the United States. The student teams will work on various task categories like developing bio-products from forest thinning operations, and copper recovery from waste stream in semiconductor industry. All teams will prepare four different presentations, written, oral, a bench-scale model and poster, as part of their tasks. UNM students and Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Professor David Kauffman, advisor to the team, will compete in the task, “Low Energy Seawater Desalinization System.” Kauffman said the contest gives students a chance to see real-life problems and to explore the possibilities of solutions. The WERC consortium is comprised of New Mexico State University, the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, UNM, Diné College, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, and industrial affiliates. ###

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