A school in San Mateo Ixtatán, Guatemala, recently made history. For the first time, the school’s wastewater flows to a treatment tank and not the local river. But for the University of Rhode Island engineering student who led the project, it marked just the beginning of a quest to help remote villages build sustainable infrastructure.

Meet Marc Vigeant, a 22-year-old civil engineering graduate student who dreams of big change in how humans treat their water, generate their electricity and construct their buildings. As an undergraduate, he fostered a student group focused on sustainability and spent two years planning the trip to Guatemala. Now, as a graduate student, he is combining a master’s in engineering and an M.B.A. with hopes of opening an engineering firm specializing in renewable energy.

“I think we all have a duty to address the environment,” Vigeant says. “Civil engineers especially because we are ultimately responsible for the impact our infrastructure has on the environment.”

That duty extends to San Mateo Ixtatán. It’s a village where electricity is scarce, toilets a commodity, and children learn in schools with dirt floors. It’s also where environmental oversight is weak and engineers lacking. For Vigeant, it was the ideal place for a project led by his student group, now affiliated with the national organization Engineers for a Sustainable World.

For almost two years, the group of seven engineering students met weekly to design an affordable and easily maintained wastewater treatment system for the school. Vigeant traveled to the country to get the lay of the land. In August, URI students Dan Waugh, Hoshaiah Barczynski, John Noriega, Alessandro Parola, John Shannon, Varun Kasaraneni and Vigeant arrived on the ground plans in hand and learned their first lesson: Things change.

The students discovered that the national government had ordered the school to build an outflow. But the outflow pointed the opposite direction that the students wanted. On the fly and far from the classroom, the students redesigned the system. Then it rained – a lot.

Every night water filled the hole that students dug for the treatment tank. Every day the students and villagers emptied the water and dug down a few more feet. Eventually, they dug a 5.8-by-11-foot hole with a tank that can hold about 700 gallons and improve the quality of the existing wastewater effluent by about 80 percent.

“Over the last two years just seeing the improvements that have been made has been mind-boggling,” Vigeant says.

The group received advice from engineering Assistant Professor Vinka Oyanedel-Craver as well as Stephen Andrus and Phil Virgadamo, professional engineers at GZA GeoEnvironmental Technologies in Providence. The company, along with the College of Engineering, helped fund the trip.

“I’ve been really impressed with the students,” says Andrus, a URI alumnus who went on the trip. “They do a great deal of work, and they are very devoted to their cause.”

The students tackled the project at the urging of Vigeant. In the summer of 2010, Vigeant was interning at the Rhode Island Department of Transportation and another intern mentioned that his school was undertaking engineering projects abroad. Vigeant fired up the URI website and discovered that Oyanedel-Craver has long labored to provide clean water in Guatemala. (Read related story.)

Now Vigeant hopes to follow in Oyanedel-Craver’s footsteps by visiting the village annually – even after he graduates.

“To track the project’s success and work with the village long-term would be incredibly rewarding,” Vigeant says.